Our last night in Varanasi was to be a celebration of Indian culture. We would attend a performance of traditional Indian music and dance, then go to the home of an Indian family to enjoy a "typical Indian family dinner." The dance performance was held in the home of the performer. The apartment had a fairly good size side room filled with plastic lawn chairs - the kind that usually buckle with my considerable weight wriggling around on them. No stage. just a clear area at the front. The musicians sat on the floor to the side leaving most of the area for the two dancers.
There is an art to enjoying traditional performances from a different culture. You need to suspend your own cultural biases and really accepting of the culture you are visiting. Otherwise, you are bound to decide that what you are witnessing is absurd, or silly, or discordant. Enjoying it is obligatory; after all, you paid thousands of dollars to be here. But the bottom line is, you have no frame of reference to judge the quality or authenticity of the performance. You can see what I mean by watching the video highlights below. I have to admit that while enjoying the performance - and I did find it profoundly interesting - a little corner of my brain asked, "What if this guy is just punking us?" and imagined the performers chuckling after the show at the gullible tourists who actually bought into a load of bullshit.
After dinner conversation with our hosts
I was looking forward to the dinner with an Indian family as possibly a highlight of the tour - a real chance to experience Indian home life and get close and personal with typical local people. I was naive; how could you experience anything like that when you show up at someone's house for dinner with 21 of your closest friends? Our hosts were the Singh family. They were not a typical Indian family and their house was not a typical Indian house. (Singh is a common surname in India. From a discussion among our tour group, I discerned that if your last name was Singh and you lived around Varanasi, you were either Sikh or related to the royal family. The general consensus was that our hosts were from a branch of the royal family.)
Dining area for our family meal
This family is definitely in the extreme upper level of the standard of living in India. The house was bigger and more nicely appointed than anything I or any of my friends and relatives live in. (They gave us a tour of the guest wing of the house, which they want to turn into a bed and breakfast. This meal was a test run to see how they would do.) They had servants helping to serve dinner. The dining room where we ate was the size of a small restaurant, holding 4 round tables for 5. And the food was the same as the dishes we had been getting at most of the restaurants.
Carol with the family matriarch
Don't get me wrong. The Singhs were extremely gracious hosts, making sure all our needs were met and conversing with us to our heart's content. And I really did enjoy the dinner and the evening at their home. But it was not the intimate family meal I had unrealistically envisioned. (In my defense, however, we did have such an experience on our tour of Turkey when a widow and her mother hosted our tour group in her home for a simple but delicious lunch.)
After exiting the Ganges, we wound our way through the stacked cordage of neatly stacked wood fuel piles into the narrow streets of this oldest part of Varanasi. Our goal was the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, also known as the Golden Temple, dedicated to Lord Shiva. The streets we traversed were among the narrowest and dirtiest I have experienced. The walk was spiced by the thrill of passing machine gun toting guards permanently posted near the temple to prevent trouble. It seems that there is also an important mosque in the vicinity of the temple and terrorism is a constant threat. Imagine that. We got about 60 yards from the temple when our guide informed us that because Monday is the special day for Lord Shiva, there was a considerable queue waiting to get in and that the wait would be as much as an hour or hour and a half. We all voted to forego the temple and head to our next destination.
We exited the dark streets into brilliant sunlight and piled into our SUVs for the 13 kilometer, hour long drive to Sarnath, where legend claims that Buddha gave his first speech or sermon after attaining enlightenment in the town of Bodh Gaya, some 135 miles away. Sarnath is, therefore, one of the holiest pilgrimage sites for Buddhists. Our Frommer's guide warned us that we may find it nothing more than a boring pile of bricks. They pretty much nailed it. There is a Buddhist temple next to the archeological site, with a Bhodi tree reputed to be from a cutting made from a cutting of the actual Bhodi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. The tree, or the idea of its ancient origins is interesting, but the temple seemed a little bit commercial and did not give the type of spiritual connection I have often experienced in some Buddhist Temples.
The archeological site itself is kept remarkably neat and tidy and is comprised of an extensive field of grass with excavated foundations of stupas and other structures associated with a temple and monastery that had occupied this area from about the 3rd century BC. The prominent green garbage can in the foreground most probably dates from the last century. The Sarnath Archeological Museum is associated with the site and is interesting if you are really into archeology. No photography allowed.
The most impressive structure on the site is the Dhamekh Stupa built in the very spot where the Buddha delivered his sermon. It dates from around 500 AD, fully a millennium after the sermon was spoken. But all-in-all Sarnath was an uninspiring experience. There were not a lot of pilgrims. I wonder if this is because Buddhism never caught on in India, or, if it did, died out early on. The religion really developed in nearby lands where it was exported. This parallel with Christianity fascinates me.
We left Sarnath for a most interesting drive back to Varanasi, where we had lunch at the Brownie Restaurant. How it got a name like that is anybody's guess but the food was the first we have had with any reason to complain about. The baked chicken was tough, the yellow dhal bland and watery with a passable chicken curry. I thought it was the worst meal yet but many of the people on the tour liked the food was better than any we other we had, my guess is because it was so lightly spiced. Anyway, my recommendation - the next time you're in Varanasi, don't look up Brownie. I did mention the interesting trip back from Sarnath. Click here to go to Flickr for pictures of the street scenes and other pictures of Sarnath.
We returned to the Ganges before dawn on the morning after to find Dasaswamedh Ghat in pretty much the same condition as when we arrived last evening. It was absolutely teeming with activity. The touts were out in force and, instead of waiting for a performance, most of the crowd was preparing for the morning ablutions (if you were Indian) or heading to a boat to watch the ablutions (if you were Western). Apparently part of the ablutions included getting an al fresco shave by a professional.
Of course, the highlight of the morning float was witnessing the worshipers who were bathing in this holiest of rivers. This is a custom none of us could get our minds around. I mean the river was so dirty, the color an unhealthy gray from the silt, trash visibly floating around you - how could anyone immerse themselves in what looked like a sewer? Plus, knowing what was being put into the river upstream - animal waste and human remains - you almost wanted a shower just from floating on it. But I realize this is part of our Western squeamishness. I mean animals and fish die in our water supply all the time and we still drink tap water and swim in the ocean and lakes. Maybe it's not as bad as it seems but it would be much more appealing if was even a little transparent and didn't look so much like you could use a rake to fill a bucket with its water. Here is a link to more pictures we took of Ganges bathers. And here is a little video clip of the bathers to give you an idea of the atmosphere.
In one section of the bathing video, you heard a boy chanting in the background. This is the lad in the picture to the right - the guy with a microphone. A group of monks or priests were having their own Aarti Light ceremony along the bank of the river. The following video clip gives you the flavor of this more impromptu ceremony, compared to the professional performance we watched the previous evening.
There was so much to see I really didn't know which way to turn. I probably looked like a clown trying to juggle a camera and a camcorder while trying not to miss a single nuance in the vision before me. I found a Hindu Sadhu:
An apparent child mystic deep in meditation:
Other children playing:
Goats foraging among the cold ashes of one the cremation ghats, which had no customers at the time we passed by:
But the most fascinating sights were the myriad people we watched doing laundry in the river. I watched their technique, thinking they would have to go home and wash the river dirt out of the clothes or sheets before they could use them. I also imagined our hotel taking the sheets down to the riverbank outside their front door and cleaning our bed linen. If you ever wondered how to wash clothes in the river, imitating the guy in the following video clip wouldn't be a bad idea. He really know how to beat the crap out of the sheets. Click this link to view additional laundry pictures.
We ended our river cruise at the Manikarnike Burning Ghat, where we witnessed the cremations from our boat last night. The ghat was not as busy this morning; no bodies were burning as we approached but there were two being prepared for burial. We debarked from the boat walking past the huge lingam and yoni of the ghat
and then through impressive stacks of wood used to fuel the cremations.
On the way out, we passed this cremation site worker washing off the grime from his, no doubt, grueling night's work.
Note to my readers: I have not posted to this blog for a couple of weeks due to a combination of traveling and not feeling well (a cold or cough). Some people expressed confusion about where I am, since this is written like I'm still in India. I am often transcribing my journal entries from our trip directly into the postings, so it may look like I am currently in India. We're not; we returned to the States the day before Thanksgiving. Just wanted to clarify that. We recently traveled to Denver for my niece's wedding and to Chicago for a retirement celebration Today we are in Cape Coral enjoying 75 degree weather while you guys are suffering 2 feet of snow. Eat your heart out while you're shoveling.
Our last night in Varanasi was to be a celebration of Indian culture. We would attend a performance of traditional Indian music and dance, then go to the home of an Indian family to enjoy a "typical Indian family dinner." The dance performance was held in the home of the performer. The apartment had a fairly good size side room filled with plastic lawn chairs - the kind that usually buckle with my considerable weight wriggling around on them. No stage. just a clear area at the front. The musicians sat on the floor to the side leaving most of the area for the two dancers.
There is an art to enjoying traditional performances from a different culture. You need to suspend your own cultural biases and really accepting of the culture you are visiting. Otherwise, you are bound to decide that what you are witnessing is absurd, or silly, or discordant. Enjoying it is obligatory; after all, you paid thousands of dollars to be here. But the bottom line is, you have no frame of reference to judge the quality or authenticity of the performance. You can see what I mean by watching the video highlights below. I have to admit that while enjoying the performance - and I did find it profoundly interesting - a little corner of my brain asked, "What if this guy is just punking us?" and imagined the performers chuckling after the show at the gullible tourists who actually bought into a load of bullshit.
