Vacation Travel India

In Punjab, the entrance hall of so many invasions, the impact of Islam was strong and deep. Here, Hindu dress disappeared. The sari was dropped in favor of the Islamic salwar kamiz, the modest tunic worn over drawstring pants. The rivalry between the stitched clothing of the Muslim and the unstitched draped garments of the Hindu was an expression in daily life of competing notions of civilized propriety. A new Indian identity evolved. It is epitomized in the linguistic amalgam of Hindi and Urdu, which is spoken across much of North India.

Muslims are outnumbered, almost 10 to one, yet India ranks as one of the largest Islamic populations on earth, with 110 million people. Consequently, Indian airports are overcrowded during Haj (February-March), the time of pilgrimage to Makkah.

Family terms

Extended family life in a densely populated country can be fraught with problems of privacy. Most societies in India are patriarchal and a daughter must leave her parents to set up a household with the groom’s family.

There are a bewildering number of terms for family relationships. It can sometimes seem that everyone in a room is distantly related in some fashion. “Bahu”, the daughter-in-law, and “Sas”, the mother-in-law, are important adversaries in the Indian family and a focus for conflicts about duty, obedience and respect.

Brother, “Bhai”, and older sister, “Didi”, are affectionate and respectful terms of address, even for people outside the nuclear family. It is even more common to call a visitor “Aunty” or “Uncle”, and older people may call you son, “Beta”, or daughter, Bed”. “Mata” and “Pita” are terms for mother and father (often with the respectful lag, ji, added), and there are many other names for relatives that show the birth order and branch of the family.

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It is difficult for any newcomer to be accepted until the locals can slot the person into a category. The inevitable grilling, “What is your native place?” is not just some tiresome gambit to keep a conversation from flagging. The responses are of intense interest, for the name of someone’s village, town or locality reveals a great deal to the knowledgeable.

Being able to pigeonhole a newcomer in the social hierarchy eases tensions between strangers. Indians are open and noticeably un-neurotic because they are confident that their social responses are completely correct. If a guest is not shown proper respect, it is taken as a deliberate insult towards his or her group, and the onus is upon the insulted to figure out why. Such caste concerns meant that the adoption of orphans with unknown origins was quite rare until the late 1990s. Now, more couples dare to adopt an abandoned child, usually a girl.

Converts to different religions, particularly Christianity and Buddhism, often maintain their caste links and sometimes never entirely relinquish their Hindu beliefs. Modern-day Mazbhis of Punjab, adherents of the Sikh faith, recognize the primacy of their caste origin (sweeper) in intermarriages with sweepers who converted to Christianity. Though the bride wears white, a vermilion spot on her forehead symbolizes her married status in a traditionally Hindu way.

Religious order

Schisms and sects combined with caste to complicate India’s religious order, even across religions that claim to have transcended caste, such as Islam.

Buddhism and Jainism were early religious and social movements that revolted against a strict caste structure and against the Brahmanical rigidities of Vedic ritual sacrifice. Buddhism was perceived as an assertion of Kshatriya power against Brahman supremacy.

Pali, the language of early Buddhist texts, became a vehicle of protest against elitist Brahmanical Sanskrit. Jainism found support among the trading caste. Neither movement completely severed its links with Hinduism and in turn lost much support with the rise of bhakti, devotional Hinduism.

Modern movements, the rationalist philosophy of the Brahmo Samaj and the evangelical fervour of the Arya Samaj’s shuddi conversions, may be seen as Western and Christian in inspiration. However, explanation was also sought from within Hindu philosophy - a characteristic accommodation of new ideas and influences.

Even today, language represents power and access to knowledge. Riots erupt if regional languages are seen to be snubbed by the English- and Hindi-speaking elite. When television newscasts were broadcast only in Hindi, Tamil Nadu erupted in violence. This was a grassroots refusal to accept the tongue of the conqueror, and some South Indian politicians are actively lobbying for Tamil to be ranked alongside Hindi and English as an official language for government documents.

Proselytising religions, particularly Islam and Christianity, encountered resistance at first, but both could offer concepts of immediate salvation to the dispossessed and, more crucially, both were associated with ruling powers of long tenure. Caste Hindus sometimes resent any favouritism shown to these groups by government authorities.

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You can choose from several India tour packages but one of the most important parts of your travel must be getting to know the Indian people.

Hindu scriptures predict a time of chaos and deprivation when the Code of Manu will be forgotten, and the caste structure will come crashing down. Some claim these bad times, called kaliyuga, are here already. Unemployment has forced many Hindus to desert the old village ways in order to eke out a living in contemporary India. Originally, the needy could approach sympathetic members of their own jati, who would provide a meal, a job or shelter. The traditional division of labor is breaking down, albeit slowly. K.R. Narayanan was born a Dalit and had to fight convention for an education. Following years as a high-profile lawyer and diplomat, he was President of the Republic between 1997 and 2002.

In India’s big cities, people from different castes often end up as neighbors and can’t help rubbing shoulders on the bus or in cinema halls. Unlike in the villages, where caste groups tend to live in segregated areas and traditionally only eat with their own caste members, there is some leeway for intermingling in the cities. Living in such close proximity occasionally sparks confrontation between different caste groups, especially those jockeying for position. Attempts to prove status are as crucial for career advancement as for family alliances. Opportunities, whether through quotas or connections, hinge on an Indian’s caste and community.

Although banned by the Indian constitution for 50 years, atrocities against the lowest castes occur daily. In the early 20th century Mahatma Gandhi insisted that everyone must take turns cleaning the toilet, and renamed outcastes (then known as “Untouchables”) the Harijans (”Children of God”). But many now prefer the less patronizing term Dalit (literally “the oppressed”), which is more forthright than the bureaucratic acronym SC & ST (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes). This terminology comes from the Indian constitution, written by B.K. Ambedkar, an early Dalit campaigner and brilliant lawyer, who converted to Buddhism in protest at what he saw as the divisive Hindu veneration of caste.

When New Delhi tried to implement an affirmative action plan to set aside half of all federal jobs for the officially underprivileged - which make up 85 percent of India’s population -dozens of middle-class students burnt themselves alive to protest at their loss of opportunities. These so-called “caste martyrs” contributed to the overthrow of Prime Minister V.P. Singh, and reservation continues to be a controversial issue in many areas of the country.

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India’s caste system is based on the twin concepts of dharma and karma, the duties one must fulfill in this life and the effects one’s actions will have on any future lives. These, coupled with the principle of hereditary occupation and strong concepts of pollution, produced a highly stratified society which, due to its flexibility, was one that could absorb new peoples with little trouble.

The Laws of Manu (circa AD 150) spell out codes for life in a multiracial society. Each individual is born into a particular jati or caste that predetermines both profession and status, regardless of the wealth of the parents. These castes are said to fall into four basic divisions, or varna. The Brahmans are intellectuals and priests - the link between mortals and millions of Hindu deities. Kshatriyas are rulers and warriors, in charge of justice and administration. Both Brahmans and Kshatriyas are considered “twice-born” and display their status with a sacred thread worn over the shoulder. Below them are the Vaishyas, merchants or traders, and the Shudras, agriculturalists. However, the most menial tasks were reserved for the outcastes, in practice the peoples conquered by higher castes and considered unworthy to be part of the system. These jobs include cleaning latrines, sweeping the streets, scavenging, burning corpses and gathering dead animals (which extends to working with leather, making shoes and playing drums at funerals or weddings).

A wedding, the ultimate family occasion, will bring out latent caste differences even in liberal-thinking modern professionals who have earned degrees for jobs forbidden them by birth. Every Sunday, classified advertisements in Indian newspapers list brides and grooms available for arranged marriages under specific headings of caste. Only occasionally - if the bride is over 30 years old, for example, or the groom is HIV-positive - will these “wanted” advertisements say “Paste no bar”.

There are thousands of subdivisions possible within the four major caste divisions, and these jati really matter. They determine the degree of superiority within society’s pyramid. Caste is not something that can be easily lied about. It may be encoded in a surname - one reason why traditional families still insist on an arranged marriage. A child will inherit the caste of the father, so inter-caste marriages are tolerated by the bride’s relatives if it is the groom who marries down. For consenting to such a match, a bigger dowry is demanded by the groom’s family.

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You can choose from several India tour packages but one of the most important parts of your travel must be getting to know the Indian people.

It would be almost impossible to pick out a single person as a typical Indian. The diversity among more than 1 billion citizens is mind-boggling: from the Adivasi societies of the Northeast to the Tamil-speakers of the South, this incredible array of humanity spices up the spectacle of crowd-watching. Any description of this huge variety of societies and cultures must, of necessity, be highly simplified, and for each assertion made there are bound to be many examples that contradict it.

India’s melting pot

At least six different sets of peoples converge in present-day India, after millennia of traders, conquerors, colonizers, mercenaries and missionaries that swept through South Asia from outside.

The first settlers are thought to be the forebears of the present-day Adivasis. These peoples still dwell in mountainous or jungle zones in a belt that stretches from Arunachal Pradesh’s high forests to India’s southern tip at Kanniyakumari.

The Dravidian-speaking peoples, who drove the Adivasis into the margins, away from plains lush with sugar cane and rice, now live mainly in the south Deccan. Apparently related to the pre-Hellenic Aegeans and Cretans, they brought the Harappan culture to its zenith at the cities of Harappa and Mohenjadaro. (The most impressive archaeological ruins are sited in what is now Pakistan.) The Dravidians were in turn pushed back by peoples who galloped into India from Central Asia and dominated the Indo-Gangetic plain from around 1,500 BC.

These new peoples were warriors and herdsmen who found the urban settlements of the Indus Valley peoples alien to their traditional way of life as nomadic herders. However, as they spread out across the plains of North India they began to settle in agricultural village communities. The language of their earliest writings, Sanskrit, and Latin share many root words and a basic grammar pattern, pointing to a common ancestry with peoples in southern Europe. From the Bharatas, a dominant Indo-European speaking people, comes Bharat, the official name for India - the “B” in BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which won political power in the late 1990s.

This wave of invaders was followed by Arab Semites from the area now comprising Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. They settled in large numbers. Jews escaping from Nebuchadnezzar arrived around 600 BC at the Malabar coast and became spice traders. Refugee Zoroastrians fled from Persia in the 10th century, and ended up in Mumbai. Persecuted Baha’is from modern Iran arrived more recently. In the Himalayas and on the northeastern frontier with Burma (Myanmar), most peoples have more in common, in terms of both culture and history, with neighboring societies to the north and east than with people of the Hindi-speaking belt of the central plains. Added to these are several million Tibetans in exile, who have taken sanctuary in India since 1959 and cluster in mostly mountain communities, although there are some monasteries as far south as Karnataka.

Early European court visitors and explorers included Portuguese, Danes, British and French, and long-term settlers soon followed. Eurasians, as the offspring of many mixed marriages were called during the British Raj (often now known as Anglo-Indians), are acutely aware of the slightest skin tone variance even today. Bleaching away a suntan with harsh chemicals is a standard practice in beauty parlors. There are few coy euphemisms about racial distinctions in polite society because they are one obvious key to prestige. Yet ancestry is only one component of India’s complex social hierarchy.

Vivid multi-striped foreheads in earth tones of white, yellow, or saffron are not decoration, but a marking that denotes affiliation to a particular deity or a sign of religious devotion. They range from a simple tilak, a religious mark smeared with a vermilion-dipped thumb, to elaborate patterns daubed across the forehead. Don’t confuse these marks with the bindi (bhindhya, kum-kum, tikkaj, worn by women over their “third eye”. The round red forehead dot traditionally signifies that a woman is married. But the glittery stick-on bindis sold in the bazaar are decorative and just for fun. Grandmothers, teenagers, movie stars, and even babies wear bindis.

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