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.)
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.
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