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121 pages

English

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This delightful travelogue around ten conducted tours is full of rich experiences: hanging on to a camel in the Thar, rediscovering music on the trail of Kabir, joining thousands on an ancient pilgrimage in Maharashtra, crossing living root bridges near Cherrapunji, and more. As much about people as places, the book is also a reflection on the nature of popular travel today marked by the packaging of experiences, the formation of tourist economies and compulsive picture-taking. How this influences tourists comes through vividly: in their creating a mini- India in a bus, while racing through treasured sights in Europe; in their perfunctory devotion while hopping from temple to temple in Tamil Nadu; in their enjoying with sex workers far away from home. Deeply felt, ironic, and often comic, the book entertains and enlightens, and becomes an idiosyncratic portrait of India and her people.

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

Popular culture

India

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	15 décembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351185703
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Srinath Perur

IF IT S MONDAY IT MUST BE MADURAI
A Conducted Tour of India
Contents
Introduction
1. The Grace of God
2. Saare Jahaan Se Achha
3. Desert Knowledge Camel College
4. Foreign Culture
5. Memorial to the Victims of Repression
6. Santa Claus Aa Rahe Hai
7. According to Their Own Genius
8. The Same Water Everywhere
9. Real India
10. The Taste of Sugar
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
Introduction

The official at Immigration, Mr Pandey, looked glumly at me as I told him why I was going on a conducted tour to Uzbekistan. If you re a writer, he said, unconvinced, then why are you travelling with a group? Serious travellers, and certainly travel writers, look upon the conducted tour as the lowliest form of travel. Even travelling with a friend or two can invite contempt. Jonathan Raban, for instance, warns anyone considering travelling with company: You re never going to see anything; you re never going to meet anybody; you re never going to hear anything. Nothing is going to happen to you. The remonstrance is all the more applicable to writers: according to Paul Theroux, In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page. I was trying to write a travel book entirely through conducted tours, a book in which I d never be travelling alone. Mr Pandey s was only the latest voice in a chorus of sceptics, but he d caught me off guard. I mumbled something about travel being cheaper this way, and he let me pass. But it was a rattled writer who rejoined his thirty-three travel companions.
I d managed to steer clear of conducted tours until early 2011, when a magazine assignment took me on a week-long bus-tour of Tamil Nadu. How bad could it be, I d asked myself before going. I had my answer before the first day was up: the tour was wrist-slittingly dull, the boredom so comprehensive that it occasionally transmuted itself into mild hysteria to redeem itself. I was with a group of retirees, and with faithful monotony we went from temple to temple seeking priority darshan. My fellow travellers were set in their ways, and there were no conversations to be had, only discourses to flee from. It didn t help, either, that I d had to surrender all sense of volition: I went where the guide asked me to go, stayed there exactly as long as I was told to.
Even as I longed to break free, I began to notice that a conducted tour by definition offers something that solitary travel cannot: other people, and the opportunity to know them. There s close and sustained contact with one s fellow tourists; they stand out against the backdrop of new places; the exertions of travel can bring to the surface aspects of character that are otherwise hidden; being away from the responsibilities of work and family, with all travel arrangements taken care of, people tend to relax, grow expansive and reveal themselves for who they are (or at least who they think they are).
My next assignment turned out to be a conducted tour as well, this time a trip across Europe in a bus full of fellow Indians. We ate Indian food throughout, watched Hindi films on the bus, played antakshari , and in between only fleetingly ventured into Europe. We d quickly take a photograph, tick the place off our lengthy itinerary, and return to the mobile little India our group constituted. If it had to be done in such a spectacularly passive fashion, then why travel at all?
These tours often stand for far more than the travel itself. A strong element of middle-class aspiration is at work, especially in overseas tours. Conducted tours allow for the conquest of the exalted foreign without much effort or discomfort. This is travel as a symbol of leisure and economic sufficiency, and the conducted tour is now a rite of passage among the middle class. For those who have retired and seen to it that their children are settled, or are otherwise considered to have finished off their responsibilities , the conducted tour is the new vanaprasthashrama -with the real work of life done, one can turn one s attention to frills such as travel. Across all age groups, travel signals success and affluence, and is displayed to one s peers through endless slide-shows and albums of photographs. Just as Indians in previous decades posed for photographs with their telephones and TVs, we now picture ourselves against the Eiffel Tower or the London Eye, or at least the gopuram of the Madurai Meenakshi temple.
For those who are passionate about travel, it is rendered far more affordable with a conducted tour. This is particularly true of foreign travel, which can prove ruinous if done independently on the Indian rupee. For those who live with an extended family, the conducted tour may temporarily offer freedoms not easily available at home: spending time in the company of one s spouse on one s own terms; being able to dress as one wants. For some it is also about socializing (as with my uncle, an inveterate conducted tourist, who goes with the same tour company every time because he knows he ll be travelling with people like us ). For youngsters, especially girls with overprotective elders at home, an organized tour may be the only way to receive permission to travel. For many, the wide world of airports, officious Immigration officers, unfamiliar food, and foreign customs is simply too much to navigate, and they take conducted tours precisely because nothing is going to happen to them.
It may be that we are cautiously coming upon individualism, or that many more now have a disposable income-whatever the reasons, Indians are increasingly looking to travel, and their chosen way of doing so is the conducted tour. There has simultaneously been an emphasis on developing tourism, and the last decade has seen an explosion in the variety of tours on offer in India-tours targeted at the young, or foreign tourists, or farmers, or women, or the elderly. Destinations can range from villages in India to almost any place in the world. Travel themes-in addition to the usual sightseeing and pilgrimage-now include music, adventure, ecology, food, sex, photography, and much more. If you can think of a reason to travel, there s probably a tour company that offers it in a convenient package. The kinds of tours being offered and the people going on them capture something particular about these times. Thus the idea of a book about India and Indians written through the medium of conducted tours.
For the purposes of this book, a conducted tour is a travel experience with a fixed itinerary, orchestrated by someone else, and undertaken in a group. I tried to pick tours that between them covered a variety of themes, destinations, modes of transport, and fellow tourists. As I went on more tours, I found I was also unknowingly testing the limits of what this format of travel had to offer: the last couple of tours, such as the pilgrimage to Pandharpur, or the Shodh Yatra that takes people on a walking tour of villages in search of traditional knowledge, were nothing like the Tamil Nadu and Europe tours I had started with. The ten tours written about in this book range in duration from three hours to three weeks, in cost from a few hundred rupees to over a lakh. They were all undertaken in the company of different groups in the years 2011 and 2012. Two of the tours are to places outside India, but in the company of Indians; a couple are with foreigners in India; the rest with Indians in India. Many of my fellow travellers appear here under names that are not their own.
Travelling for this book turned out to be more fun and educative than I had expected. For the first time in my life I rode a camel, drew water from a well, slept under a truck, cleaned my teeth with a neem twig, went on a substantial pilgrimage, and danced to an item song. I rediscovered music, took a (not entirely planned) dip in the Kerala backwaters, visited a slum, and went to parts of India I had always wanted to see. Among the hundreds of people I ran into were farmers, renunciates, medicine-men, musicians and sex workers. If travel is about new experiences, places and people, about inward shifts as well as geographical displacement, then it turns out that travel is after all possible through conducted tours. And should Mr Pandey happen to read this book, I trust he will agree that it is not entirely outrageous for a writer to want to travel with a group.
1
The Grace Of God

Our tour bus Photo courtesy Jyothy Karat
This is my first time on a conducted tour: eight days in a Tamil Nadu Tourism bus, moving south from Chennai in short hops along the coast to Kanyakumari, and back via Madurai and Trichy. Our tour guide is the industrious Mr N, who will prove ever-willing to provide unscheduled stops at places of religious significance.
I am on assignment for Outlook Traveller magazine along with photographer Jyothy Karat. She and I are by far the youngest of the twenty-one tourists on board. The rest are between fifty and sixty-five years old, many just-retired with settled children. The bulk of our group is Telugu speaking-a few couples plus eight or ten members from a single family. There is an immediate division along linguistic lines with all the Telugu speakers forming a solid group. The outliers are Jyothy and I, a Bengali couple and an NRI woman who looks remarkably like Johnny Lever.
The men on the tour have worked in banks and public sector undertakings, one has been a headmaster. The women are mostly housewives. All this is revealed in a self-introduction session organized by Mr N after we leave Chennai. We take turns to lurch up to the mike at the front of the coach to state-Mr N is always exact in his directions- name, place, what you are doing, and designation . The men, to a man, speak for their wives. The Bengali gent delineates his identity in three crisp sentences: I am from Calcutta. I am a Bengali. I am a retired government servant. Ms Lever says, I ve