Turbans and the empty houses of old rulers--tour of Rajasthan

---

Lately, my roommates and I have been discussing the way our jobs are often glorified as charity or self-sacrifice. “You’re such a good person,” or “you’re doing such good work” are phrases we’ve each heard a lot of, and which we were all subjected to in high quantity over our holiday visits home. For lack of a better understanding of what it is we do, our friends and family members often refer to our jobs as “saving the world.” And while the motivation to better some aspect of society and improve people’s lives is certainly an important part of why we do what we do, “at the end of the day” (as Parendi is fond of saying) it’s just a job. We do it because it’s a career path. We do it because it pays the bills. We do it for the fundamental and purely selfish reason that it makes us happy.

And in that line of thought, one of the sweetest perks of my job (right up there with the warm fuzzy feeling I get from empowering adolescent girls) is the opportunity for travel. For one, I get to live and work in Bangladesh, where I am constantly learning different ways of speaking, thinking, behaving, greeting, eating, cooking, bargaining, and crossing the street. The list of countries I need to see before I die is long, and if someone is going to pay me to work my way down that list, I’m on it.

Not only do I get to work abroad—I even have opportunities to go abroad from my job abroad. Last week Parendi and I were given the extreme pleasure of having a work-related excuse to go to India. As part of a network of research assistant working for Poverty Action Lab in the region, we were invited to take part in the annual JPAL South Asia RA Meet in Jaipur, Rajasthan. The meet was timed so that we could attend the Police Performance Conference, arranged to unveil the findings of a JPAL research project investigating different means of improving police performance in the district of Rajasthan. Abhijit Banerjee (one of the founders of JPAL and the head principal investigator on the police project) delivered the findings to a room full of police representatives, policy makers, and activists. The conclusions were so anticipated that Rahul Gandhi (son of Sonia Gandhi, the last president of India, and former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi; grandson of Indira Gandhi, former Prime Minister of India; and great grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of the nation) was invited as the honorable guest and delivered a long speech on the importance of police reform, national security, and the progress of India. While I am well acquainted with the JPAL objectives of conducting rigorous research that can be translated into policy, this was my first opportunity to witness the significance of the research that JPAL does in an international context of policy making and informed development. Simply by association with JPAL, I felt a sense of pride when I looked at the banner strung across the stage bearing the JPAL/MIT logo alongside the crest of the Rajasthan police force. It was academia in action, and I was pleased to bear witness. This sense of pride was validated by Abhijit’s announcement that JPAL was recently awarded one of the 2008 Frontier’s of Knowledge Award—a Spanish award designed to rival the Nobel Prize in its generosity and prestige.

The rest of the RA meet was devoted to brief presentations from the various RA teams, each of which dovetailed into discussions about our roles as RAs, the challenges we face, and common strategies for improving our research and monitoring. In the course of discussions about projects analyzing voter decision making in Delhi or micro-finance in South India, I quickly realized what an outlier I am. JPAL’s preferred hiring strategy is to hire an RA from the US (equipped with quantitative data analysis skills and experience using STATA software) to work in tandem with a local RA (who can speak the relevant language, negotiate the pace and practice of business, etc.). I fit neither of those qualifications, as I am neither Bangladeshi nor do I have the slightest clue about data cleaning, “disentangling effects,” or manipulating STATA. A qualitative softy among math-minded econ PHD hopefuls, I suffered several moments of feeling useless and clueless. But putting those feelings aside (as I had to when I first joined the project and couldn’t figured out why anyone had hired me for the job), I also felt quite grateful to be immersed in a group of young people who are devoted to using tested research methods in innovative ways for the improvement of international policy and development. I felt privileged to be surrounded by the people who will most likely be the faces of development research and policy twenty years from now. This conference may have reaffirmed my interest in getting out of research and being more directly involved in research programming, but it also confirmed my resolution that development and policy prescriptions should more closely follow the evidence generated by such rigorous methods as JPAL uses. I couldn’t help but wonder at the possibility that perhaps several years down the road I will be collaborating with some of my fellow RAs to implement and evaluate innovative development approaches.

Having completed the three day RA meet, Parendi and I set out to take advantage of our free flight to India and extend our stay in Rajasthan by a few days. By the grace of good timing MC had just completed her exams in Scotland, and had flown to Jaipur to join us on holiday. So after watching half of a Bollywood movie (we had to leave at the interval because the rapid succession of one cheap scary scene after another was too much for our heart rates) at Jaipur’s famously beautiful art-deco Raj Mandir theater and doing some serious shopping in the capital of hand-work block print and embroidered leather sandals, the three of us boarded a night bus headed west through the Thar Desert for the beginning of our adventure.

Day 1

Initially we were much impressed by the genius of bus sleeper cabins, which are much like trains in that they have overhead sleeping compartments built to comfortably fit one to three passengers. Unlike trains, however, buses are not blessed with the predictability of forward motion commanded by rails and are prone to swerving off the road to avoid oncoming lorries and stopping suddenly to let herds of goats and sheep pass. In the early morning we abandoned our efforts to keep from rolling all over the cabin and instead took to watching life in Rajasthan.

At the edge of a small town a gypsy family packed up its blankets and spare belongings as the children played in abandoned coils of plastic tubing. Throughout the vast stretches of desert women in typical pinks and yellows walked with stacks of wood or silver water jugs balanced on their heads; with their saris pulled completely over their faces as neon veils they looked like electric ghosts emerging from the emptiness of the desert. An old man in a large white turban squatted by a bush as his camel fed from a nearby tree. Young boys dressed in oversized blazers (who would one day trade their goats for camels and their pants for a dhoti with a turban, like the old man) drove herds of goats along the road. At a roadside stop we stopped for sugary chai with cardamom. Men sat squatting in the frames of an abandoned building; a lone vegetable vendor washed and stacked pyramids of cabbage and tomatoes, the only arrangements of natural color that we had seen for miles.

The landscape became more barren and the towns less frequent, until we eventually arrived in Jaisalmer. One of Rajasthan’s typical fort cities, Jaisalmer is unlike the others (Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur) in the palpability of its isolation and poverty in the middle of the desert. The small town clings to the bottom of a hill, above which sits the old fort, surrounded by five kilometers of protective wall. The fort itself is no longer the house of Rajput rulers nor is it really preserved in its historic grandeur. Instead it is now occupied by houses of normal Jaisalmeri citizens, a few temples, several herds of cows, and an explosion of hippie clothing stories and Italian roof top restaurants. For all the hype of The Golden City being the most manageable and “authentic” of Rajasthan’s major destinations, it was essentially a tourist trap.

Thankfully we were rescued from the clutches of hungry rickshaw drives and touts (driven, no doubt, by the aggression that is required of living on the frontiers of the desert) by a fortuitous contact. Parendi had a friend in college who had been involved with an NGO in town. All we knew was that there was a school that promoted cultural preservation and education for the children of local “tribes,” but with a phone number and a name we earned ourselves an invitation to meet Sarwar Khan, the head of the school.

Half an hour outside the city in the direction of the Sam sand dunes, we were deposited in front of a cluster of brightly painted brick huts (circular with thatch roofs). The signs in front read “Merasi Artist’s Residence: Cultural performances arranged every night” and “Promoting human rights and cultural preservation.” Inside we were met by Sarwar Khan, the instantly inspiring head of the school and artists’ community. He and his organization—designed to provide education, livelihoods, and protection from discrimination to members of the untouchable-caste Merasi group of which he himself was a member—ended up being the highlight of my time in Rajasthan, far more inspiring than the walls of old forts or empty stretches of desert.

Aside from representing perseverance in the face of adversity and hope for the future, Sarwar Khan also happened to be an extremely useful person to know. In less than half an hour he arranged for Parendi and MC and I do to do exactly what we had come to Jaisalmer to do: an overnight camel safari in the Thar Desert.

I had been talking about this camel safari for months, looking forward to the adventure of boarding an ancient transport and loping gracefully through the dramatically contoured desert landscape. Late afternoon was upon us as we straddled our one-humped camels; we arched our backs and leaned back to allow the massive animals to rise from their kneeling position and assume their towering stance. There was a camel driver for each of our camels, and they quietly set off in the direction of the setting sun, leading us by ropes that were attached to wooden plugs in the camels’ noses. Despite the picture-perfect setting, any trace of romantic adventure was lost within the first five minutes. Parendi’s camel was making distressing heavy breathing noises, mine was frothing at the mouth, and we suspect that MC’s had a bladder infection (it stopped at least once every fifteen minutes to pee).

I had been prepared for camels to be smell of coarse fur and have spitting problems; I was not prepared, howver, to encounter camels like ours, of the farting and vomit-noise-making variety. So with little fanfare and increasingly sore bums, we trotted along a path that paralleled the highway; we were accompanied by a symphony of guttural camel noises and lorrie horns, and were even shut out of conversation with each other because of the strength of the desert wind that carried our voices.

Thankfully, when you’re essentially renting camels and camel drivers by the day, you can do whatever you want. So after a mere hour or so of camel-safariing, we descended from our camels and opted to walk the rest of the way to our camp. Even if jeans and flip-flops, walking through the desert was much preferred to trotting along at a pace that made you wish you’d packed a better sports bra and a pair of padded bicycle shorts.

We made our way through the flat desert brush (passing through only one small village all the while; our camel drivers informed us that it hosted one of the only schools of the region; they themselves had lived too far off in the desert to attend school) until we eventually reached the edge of the Sam dunes. In the fading light we plodded over and around dunes, staying dutifully distant behind our camels for fear of a wayward kick from a ten foot long camel leg. After night had already fallen we eventually rounded a bend and spotted the red break light of a motorcycle. There we met the man who owned our camels; he had deposited blankets on the top of a dune where we would sleep and left us with the provisions for dinner. We were instructed to settle on our pile of blankets in the brush and wait as our camel drivers tied up our camels and prepared food. As they chatted in Jaisalmeri (a local language related to Hindi but entirely indecipherable to me) and built a fire, we tucked under the same blankets that had saddled our camels and stared at the stars while drinking tea that tasted mostly of smoky milk. We ate hot chapattis, fresh from the hands of our camel drivers, and used them to sop up the juices of dal and mixed vegetable. For a desert meal it was incredibly satisfying, and provided the perfect prelude to curling up and settling in for a night of sleep in the desert.

Day 2

Our single blankets managed to stave off the cold until surprisingly late in the morning. When I eventually peaked my head out of my cocoon I found the surrounding dunes covered in mist; no sun to be found, only a brisk morning wind and the suggestion that it was not quite time to wake yet. In response to my rustling the camel driver who had been left in charge of guarding us for the night (one was sleeping with the camels, and the third had been sent back to the village) stuck his head out of his own blanket pile, but only enough to check on me; when he saw that we were all still curled up and that I was in no rush to get out of bed, he retreated back into his own cocoon.

I drifted back to sleep and eventually woke to the sound of little boys chatting. This time when I poked my head out of the blankets I discovered that the camel drivers were awake and had already begun preparing tea. The little boys were nephews of one of the camel drivers, and had come for tea and biscuits. They stared wide eyed at us, three strange girls with light skin in the desert, and dutifully answered our questions and posed for our pictures. They, like their fathers and uncles, did not go to school, as there was no school in the vicinity for them to attend. In ten or fifteen years, if Jaislamer continues to lives off of the meager and unpredictable revenue of the tourism industry, these little boys might camp on the same dune and make the same milk tea for another group of tourists, the way their fathers and uncles did. If they are lucky, they will own their own camels and their nephews and nieces will go to school. But without education there is no telling where the forces of development and tourism will take these boys. For now they have little choice but to help their uncles and contribute to the family income. After finishing their tea they collected the extra blankets, piled them on their heads, and scurried off into the foggy desert morning.

To complement the romance of our camel safari, MC spent the morning vomiting at the foot of our sand dune. Cursed with a stomach whose tolerance for travel does not math her aspirations, MC had managed to contract some kind of stomach bug within the first few days of arriving in India. Eventually freed of the contents of her stomach, she put on every layer of clothing that she had packed into the desert and joined us as we trudged back over the sand dunes and through the desert toward Jaisalmer.

Thankfully the pace of the desert is slow and we made our way comfortably. After a lunch of chapatti and mixed vegetable (even better than the night before, though this is perhaps the effect of limited choice) and a nap under the clear windy desert sky, we arrived at the Merasi artists’ community just in time for an outdoor shower before the sun dropped and the wind picked up. Parendi and I spent the rest of the early evening in town, watching the sun set from the fort wall, bargaining with local fruit and vegetable vendors (the desert makes you miss produce), and buying gifts of sweets and mango pickle for Sarwar and the other artists.

In that sea of tourist madness that is Jaisalmer, there was something comforting (if elitist) about being slightly more knowledgeable than the rest of the foreigners and using this advantage to complete such banal tasks as picking out good fruit—tasks that can help you feel at home and in control when you are otherwise just a clueless foreigner. Parendi, whose is of Parsi (Iranian) descent and whose parents are from Bombay, is constantly being told that she must be Indian. And even I, with my freckled white skin and blue eyes, was asked by two different people if I was Indian (and yes, it made my day both times). Together we make a good bargaining team. As our taxi driver told me later that evening, “Look. I’m giving you the Indian price. Because she looks Indian, and you speak Indian. So together you are like an Indian.”

We left the fort behind, aglow on the hill, and sped off into the desert toward the artists’ village, where we spent the rest of the evening hanging out with Chandiriya, the community’s singer in residence. She is a very young 23, and another of the stories of victory over adversity. I french braided her hair while she sang impromptu songs about vegetables and Parendi cooked us dinner. It was one of those completely unpredictable circumstances that ends up being the most valuable time spent.

Day 3

The next morning put us on a 6 hour bus ride and deposited us in Jodhpur—the third fort city of our tour—seven hours later. In the cheesy restored haveli (“wind palace,” or fancy pants private residence) where we stayed, MC assumed her usual position on the bed and slept while Parendi and I went to explore the old fort. Jodhpur’s is the best preserved and most interesting of the forts. An incredibly thorough audio tour guided us through rooms where we wondered at the intricately painted dumbbells of past queens (what ever happened to the tradition of female exercise in India?), Persian wheels that transported water from the desert plain to the upper chambers of the mountain-top fort, and genius architectural tricks designed to fend off attackers. When the museum staff eventually took away our audio sets and kicked us out of the premises, we took a last glance of the city from the highest fort wall and then began to wind our way down through the lanes back into the modern day city.

At a shop selling home ground and blended spices we met the nicest couple in India. Rekha made us chai from her own blend of spices as she explained to us the properties of the various ingredients (black pepper is for energy, and cinnamon is for clearing sinuses). The husband beamed proudly as he talked about the rare support that they provide to each other and their dedication to their daughters and their family business.

As these things go, the euphoria of the tea encounter and the pleasantness of our stroll back to the hotel (we drank famous local lassis on the way home and bought a beautiful papaya) was brutally assaulted by a gang of eleven year old boys. They descended on us in a pack of fifteen or so and snatched at our bags; one even grabbed me in places that you wouldn’t think boys of such a young age knew were off limits. I chased after him down the street, through an alley and down another street until I decided I was either going to have to drop my bags (with my cameras and money) to really give him chase or just give up. It still aggravates me to think that he got away—that somewhere in Jaipur is a twat of an eleven year old who will grow up to think he can treat women however he wants. And to think that on a busy street in a major city in India, nobody on the street reacted as a little boy molested a foreign woman. I suppose this had to happen, however—this reminder of why my relationship with India is one of love-hate, and not just of plain and simple adoration. For all the beautiful forts, incredible paneer curries, and inspirational women I meet here, there are still eleven year old boys to remind me that India is a place where women cover their heads, travel in groups, and avoid being on the streets alone. It’s a place where women like Pinky are confined to their homes for fear of going outside by themselves, and where nobody so much as flinches when small children terrorize women just because they are women.

Day 4

After breakfast on the haveli rooftop, overlooking the palace where the Jodhpur royal family still lives, we set off on the last of our epic bus rides. Another six or seven hours took us back through the desert to Jaipur. It was a rather uneventful day, characterized by excessive amounts of biscuit eating (for lack of better bus food) and attempts at catching up on the sleep that we had lost to sleeping in deserts, on buses, and in shared beds. We rounded out our last night in Rajasthan salads and pomegranate juice from the bougie Anokhi café (even I need a break from Indian food sometimes) and a last trip to the locally famous sweet and namkeen (salty snacks) restaurant for gifts.

On a side note: in the theme of the previous night’s run in, while walking to the sweets store I had a rock thrown at my back by a boy who looked suspiciously to be about 10 or 11 year olds. This event was nowhere nearly as traumatic as the night before, though I now truly fear gangs of small boys.

Day 5

Alas the pitfall of such whirlwind vacations is that a significant proportion of time is spent in transit, and thus our last day was spent primarily in airplanes and airports. I had to bid farewell to my sister, who had rallied significantly in her last 24 hours in India (when we meet next in Scotland in April, we can expect happier stomachs, if perhaps less exciting food). Now I am home again, returned to my own bed, my own shower, my own kitchen, and a country that is perpetually humid and full of mosquitoes the size of dinosaurs. Its good to be back. I am thankful to be back in a country where even though I have to cover up and behave as a good Bangladeshi woman should, I never fear for my safety and I know that the behavior of 11 year old boys is safely ruled by the fear of God and social retribution. But for all the fatigue and trauma of travel of course I am already dreaming of my next trip to India (in June?), a country to which I suspect I will never stop returning.

---

Photos

Not much else to do
at sunrise in the middle of the Thar Desert

Rajani and I in Delhi
An old friend from Chennai, who has recently married and moved to Delhi

Police on camels
preparing for Republic Day celebrations

Ferris Wheel Walker
The last night of our conference was spent at a bizarre "heritage experience resort"--kind of like Indian Disneyland. Among the bizarre offerings: camel rides, palm reading, opportunities to dress up like traditional Rajasthani ethnic groups, and a ferris wheel that was partially propelled by the highly underpaid staff worker who rain it like a hamster on a spinning wheel.

Comments

[Rhinochaser]

Camel Safaris Not so Romantic in Real Life!
Libby, Loved your most recent post. We spent a month of our honeymoon in Rajasthan and thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the intestinal issues that Carrie and MC seemed to share. I also looked forward with great romantic anticipation of the camel safari into the Thar desert. My bum had so many sores upon it after the first day that I cut the trip short and came back the following day, rather than endure any more of this medieval form of torture. While the camels were not pleasant, the most unsettling thing for me was waking-up to dung beatles scampering all around you - pushing or rolling pieces of - well, you know, "dung" with their hind legs, back to their homes for a "warm meal" I suppose. When we woke up, there were beatle tracks EVERYWHERE in the sand around us. Many tracks "ended" at the edge of the blankets we slept under, but I found it hard to believe that these dung beatles had not been walking all over us during the middle of the night, either rolling dung on top of us, or at least walking upon our blankets and possibly us with there rather unclean "feet". They also flew all over the place in a somewhat unpredictable manner. They flew very close to us and I was constantly afraid that one might fly right in to us. Definitely a memorable experience, but not one that I would care to repeat. Happy Travels!

[rajeev dubey]

wao! what a journey in desert
hai, my name is rajeev,i lived in kanpur city,i am a student of human rights( last semister). these pictures of desert is quet,humble, and your nature is very preety,i like your coperative ,mixing nature very much.this is very helpful to change my behaviour ..pls always guided to me as a friends. if you can help me to search a job for human rights related topic pls send me detail . your friend! my email adress is [e-mail]