The North Part III: Jaipur

After a long hiatus, I am resuming the blog. My hiatus has been so long that I am actually back in the U.S. now. I've been promising pictures and stories from the rest of my time in India, though, so I will go ahead all at once now what I should have been writing over the past month.

When I left off, I had written about my time in Agra. I left Agra late in the evening and took a train to Jaipur, where I arrived in the middle of the night. I sleepwalked my way to a hotel, and woke up the following morning in a new city.

Jaipur is the capital of the state of Rajasthan and a city of over 3 million. Rajasthan is somewhat of an anomaly among north Indian states - unlike most other parts of the North, the Rajputs who ruled the state managed to fend off Mughal attempts to conquer it the 17th and 18th centuries. Jaipur was established by the Rajputs as a capital city and fort in the early 1700s. If Rajasthan is an anomaly among north Indian states for its fierce independence, Jaipur is also an anomaly among Indian cities. Jaipur was the first and remains one of the few planned cities in India. Unlike most cities in India which have developed in a haphazard and organic fashion, the streets in Jaipur are laid out on an orderly grid, with the palace buildings at the heart of everything. Much of the city is still within the original fort walls. The city also lies in a basin, so it has grown vertically rather than sprawling outwards. After Delhi and Agra, both of which are spread out and easy to get lost in, the ease of getting around Jaipur was refreshing.

I had only a day in Jaipur, so I had to really pick and choose what to see. I started with the main historic buildings in the central city. I went first to the Hawa Mahal, or the Palace of the Winds. It is so named because the building's architecture is designed to harness the wind and provide a cool sanctuary.



I went next to the city palace, a complex of royal buildings in the central city that are now a museum dedicated to the history of Rajasthan. The highlight was definitely the intricate painting in the archways. Unfortunately, I couldn't go in the main building, the Chandra Mahal where the royal family lived (when they weren't in the Hawa Mahal, I presume). It was closed for some reason. I did pick up an anecdote about the building though. Apparently, a prince, facing an advancing army of invaders, decided to commit suicide in this building by venomous snake bite. His 21 wives then all committed a sacrificial rite consisting of burning themselves on his funeral pyre. Geez! Wikipedia corroborates this tale, so it must be true.







I spent the early afternoon walking around the city. Here are some pictures of the streetscapes.



You can see the deliberate planning here. All the shops are uniformly sized and the addresses are numbered in a logical fashion (most addresses in India are something along the lines of Near Regal Cinema, or Behind the Bus Stand, I pity the mailmen). Incidentally, Jaipur is also known as the Pink City. I'm sure you can see why.






Here's part of the old fort wall. Most of it is still intact, and much of it now forms one wall of a building.


Around dusk I went up to a temple in the hillside. The temple is actually dedicated to the Sun God, but most tourists call it the Monkey Temple, because its crawling with monkeys. The view from the hillside was nice, though hazy.


Monkeys!


In the early afternoon I met a student named Adil. He gave off a very genuine, friendly vibe so I stopped to talk to him. We hit it off and he ended up inviting me over to his family's house for dinner. His dad owns a jewelry business (Jaipur is a gem and jewelry capital) and they gave me a little tour of the shop. Unfortunately, most of the workers were gone by this point in the evening, but one gave me a brief demo of gem cutting.


Adil lives with his family in a very central part of the city. He has a large extended family (six uncles, I can't recall how many aunts), all of whom live close by. We went up on the roof of his family's house and he was able to point to all of his relatives homes. Nobody lived more than 10 blocks away. His family has also been in the same home for 5 generations now, and as the family has grown, they have simply added additional stories onto the roof of the home. Its now 5 stories tall (one for each generation, I suppose) and the view from up there is exquisite. The pink of the city at dusk is incredible.



I ate dinner with Adil and his father, Yusuf, in the office. They live right next to the business. Before we ate I got to see some sample of the jewelry and got a brief tutorial in types of stones and evaluating stone quality.


We ate a big meal of chicken biryani and then sat around talking for hours. I ate about 5 helpings, until I realized that in order to signal that I was done eating I had to leave some food on my plate. You really have to eat until you are full! Adil, Yusuf, and I ate alone, which has left me curious about the family structure ever since. I know the family is large, but I didn't meet anyone else. I've been left wondering if they didn't want to overwhelm me by introducing me to 15 people, or if it is common for the father and oldest son to eat separately. More than anything it was an experience in being gracious and culturally sensitive. I could sense that the women in the family lead a very separate life from the men. I strained my mind to allow the coexistence of my thoughts of how wrong this is and also the thoughts of how little I know about exactly how their family works.

More than anything, though, I felt immense gratitude and friendship. In that one evening I made a contact that could last for a lifetime. They assured me that I was always welcome in Jaipur and in fact we have corresponded some since. I was sad to have to rush out, but alas I had to catch my overnight train to Ahmedabad.

The North Part II: Agra

I arrived in Agra around midday, having slept most of the morning away on the train. I found a hotel to stay in near the Taj Mahal. The train station is across town from the hotel, and my first glimpse of the Taj was from the rickshaw on the drive over. After you see it for the first time, there is a sort of magnetic attraction. No matter where you are in the city, thereafter you find yourself wondering, “I wonder if I can see the Taj from here?”

I spent that afternoon seeing things other than the Taj Mahal, electing to save it for early the next morning. I visited the Agra Fort, which was built prior to the Delhi fort by Akbar the Great. It was later added on to by Shah Jahan, who also built the Taj Mahal, before he decided to move the capital to Delhi! After erecting some of the most beautiful buildings in the world, he decided he would rather be in a different city. Craziness. The Agra Fort has the same massive sandstone walls as the Red Fort in Delhi, but the palaces on the interior are a bit richer in detail and better preserved. The palaces here were one of the first places that the Mughals experimented with covering sandstone with white marble, producing beautiful results. Some of the palaces here also represent a pushing of the envelope in decoration. The floral patterns might have been scandalous given the Islamic proscription on figurative decoration. The palaces with this aesthetic were built by Hindu craftsmen during the reign of Akbar. Akbar was religiously tolerant and hold the craftsmen back from the artistic stylings that came naturally to them.

I spent the afternoon walking around the city. I’m happy to report that, the Yamuna River is crawling with monkeys! I spent a good while just sitting and watching them. Fittingly, there is also a shrine there to the monkey god.

That evening I had a thali (a preset menu dinner with rice, dal, a vegetable, and bread) in a restaurant. I shared a table with an older man who had lived in Agra his whole life. He told me that when he was a kid, they used to go see the Taj Mahal for free and there was no security. He also told me that Agra used to be a major industrial city. Unfortunately, the pollution was discoloring the Taj, so the national government shut down all the factories, leaving thousands of workers out of jobs. The result has been an enormous growth in ancillary tourist industries. In almost every city in India it is easy to find rickshaws and there are people trying to sell trinkets. In Agra the number of tourist sales pitches is at a whole new level. I couldn’t walk more than 10 feet without being offered a rickshaw ride to anywhere, a guided tour of the whole city, a set of postcards, a keychain, and a Taj Mahal snow globe (why do these exist, it doesn’t snow there).

The next morning I woke up about 4 am to see the Taj Mahal. The hotel I was staying at had a rooftop balcony with a view, so I watched the sunrise over the Taj from there. Then, at 6 am, I packed my bag and walked over to the Taj. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

From the rooftop...

The elaborate gate (actually a gate within the outer walls)...

The first view of it from within the walls

Border of gold and silver

More precious stones

In the afternoon, I met I was crashing from having woken up so early. I was about to lay down for a nap in a park when a group of guys approached me. They were masters’ students in life sciences and were from Kashmir. I ended up spending the whole afternoon with them, beating the heat in a bar. We really hit it off and they are now lobbying me quite hard to visit them in Jammu. I think it will have to wait until the next time I am here though as things have been getting especially heated there in recent weeks. That evening, exhausted after spending the whole afternoon in a bar, I boarded my train to Jaipur. I was asleep within minutes.

Trip to the North Part I: Delhi

Hello all! Once again, it appears a blog entry is long overdue. I just returned from two weeks of traveling through north India. I visited five cities in 12 days, traveling by train and making stops in Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, and Indore. It was a fast and furious trip, quite depleting at times, but very rewarding. I got a good sampling of some of India’s best Mughal architecture, tried a variety of different cuisines (Punjabi, Rajasthani, Gujarati), met very warm, hospitable people in every city I went to, and even got a few days of work in while in Indore.

Since I have so much to share, I’ll split my writing about this trip into multiple entries. I am pledging myself to write an entry a day for the next five days about each of the places I went. I’ll start now with Delhi. By the way, in case you are wondering, I have two more weeks of work. After that, Arianna is coming (!!!!!) and we will spend a few days in Mumbai, before venturing south for a week or so. That takes us up to August 24 when we will fly back to the U.S. just in time for the start of fall classes.

I arrived in Delhi in the late afternoon, after a 24 hour train ride from Mumbai. The train ride was quite comfortable and caused me to curse the lack of viable intercity train options in the U.S. on numerous occasions. I rode in the A/C 3rd class, which meant I had a bench that folded out into a small bunk at night. (In case you are really curious about all the classes offered – there are eight! – check out this website). I found a hotel in the backpackers’ district of Delhi where I happily noted the difference in cost between Mumbai and the rest of India.

My first day in Delhi was spent mostly visiting different places of worship. I intended to walk around the federal building area in the evening but got sidetracked by a little rain (more on that). It was a blazing hot day, and the temples provided a great haven from the sun (not to mention the honking vehicles and the aggressive salespeople). I visited four places this day: the Friday Mosque (Jama Masjid), the Laxshmi Mandir (Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess of wealth and good fortune, Laxshmi), the Sikh temple, and the Ba’hai temple (aka the Lotus Temple).

The Jama Masjid dates back to when a Mughal emperor (Shah Jahan) moved the capital from Agra to Delhi in the 1600s. It was a very large mosque and I guess is historically significant, but it was not one of the more beautiful mosques I saw on this trip. They were also real sticklers about photographing it, so I had to steal a photo from online. The mosque is in Old Delhi, and the area around it has a bazaar feel, full of hawkers selling everything from chicken biryani to speaker systems.




The Laxshmi temple was one of the more beautiful temples I saw. It has received a significant amount of renovation within the last century, though the original temple dates back to the 1600s. It is really an entire campus, surrounded by gardens, fountains, and numerous shrines. Unfortunately, no cameras were allowed inside. There was something very distinctive about the style – it has the bold colors and intricate adornment with little statuettes and vignettes depicting the Hindu pantheon that is typical of Hindu, and especially South Indian, temple architecture. Yet it also has some modern touches. The colors are bold, but the temple has a limited color scheme – just red, gold, and white. And all the adornment is a bit more subdued than most other Hindu temples I’ve seen. It was like the spirit of a Hindu Temple meeting the cleaned up, stripped down aesthetic of a modernist designer.





The Sikh Temple was very cool, mostly because there is a round-the-clock reading of sacred texts that happens, accompanied by organ and drums. Anyone is free to just go sit in the temple and sit and pray or soak up the ambience of the reading. There is also a large bathing pool that was nice to walk around.



The Ba’hai Temple is also one of the more unique buildings in the world. I’ve decided one of my life goals is now to visit all of the Ba’hai temples in the world. I’ve been to 2 (Chicago and Delhi) of 9, and both are among the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen. The Delhi temple is designed to look like a Lotus Flower and is surrounded by nice pools. Like all Ba’hai buildings, it features nine identical sides. The symmetry and the geometry of all of the panels are stunning.




That evening, I was in the process of walking around the area of the city where all the government buildings are. This part of town was planned by the British and feels very federal – broad streets on a square/diagonal grid linking proud roundabouts. It’s very much in the vein of Paris or Washington DC. Unfortunately, my tour got cut short when the skies opened up to the first monsoon rains of the season that Delhi had received (the storms move northward so they were just arriving in Delhi). I initially took refuge under the overhang of a little shack with about 25 other people, but then made a run for the nearest metro station. I got soaked to the core within the first 20 seconds of my mad dash. When I got back to the neighborhood I was staying in, I discovered it had been inundated with about a foot and a half of water. I had to wade through the flooding to get back to my hotel, in the dark no less. My pictures don't fully convey how bad it was, but maybe this article does.

I spent most of my second day visiting monuments—the Red Fort and Humayun’s Tomb—and doing some nerdy transportation planner tourism. The Red Fort was also a Shah Jahan undertaking. Its size and heft are simply stunning – the fort must measure nearly a mile long by half a mile wide and the walls are all several stories high and probably 20 to 30 feet thick. Inside there are a number of palaces, but many are now in disrepair. The décor of the palaces is in a typical Islamic style, lots of arches and devoid of figures but featuring instead floral and geometric patterns. Interestingly, the palaces are built directly into the walls of the fort. I can imagine it was even more opulent when the gardens were fully maintained; unfortunately now, the military occupies large parts of the fort grounds, a legacy from when the British occupied it. Overall, either due to lack of preservation or because the sequel isn’t as good, the Delhi fort did not match the splendor of the Agra fort on which it was based and which I later visited.











Humayun’s Tomb, on the other hand, has been spectacularly preserved and has no comparison that I have seen. It was built for the second Mughal Emperor (before Shah Jahan) who was also the father of Akbar the Great. I was pleased to learn that Humayun’s widow oversaw both the design and construction, even camping on the site. Way to go, gender equal opportunity. This tomb has been called the warm up for the Taj Mahal, but I think the sandstone gives it a unique beauty.









I spent the rest of my day riding the parts of the Delhi metro that are now online. It’s an impressive system, though it is already very over capacity. It runs on time, the stations are nice, easy to navigate, and conveniently placed, and the trains are clean and comfortable, though stuffed. It has received much accolade because it was completed on time and within budget, rare for any major infrastructure but especially rare for a project here (most go over schedule and are somehow the source of embezzled funds). It’s very encouraging that a major transit system has been so well designed and delivered.



The rest of Delhi, on the other hand, is currently one massive construction site. The city is preparing for the Commonwealth Games in October and is repaving most of its streets, washing its monuments, etc. to impress the rest of the world. It looks highly questionable that they will be done in time. The day after the downpour, the newspapers were writing more than anything about how the city’s infrastructure might be poised for embarrassment in October.

Other impressions…I had some of the best paneer and lassi I have had yet in Delhi. Delhi is in Mughali/Punjabi food region and meat and dairy are specialties. I had a paneer tikka snack one day – it was fluffy, lightly spiced, and perfectly smoky. Lassi, meanwhile, is available everywhere on the street; I should have taken a picture – basically they just have enormous blocks of thick curd, and they skim some off, stick in a blender with ice and sugar, and serve it right there. So rich, yet so refreshing.

Overall though, Delhi didn’t have the same infectious quality that I have found Bombay to have. The two cities vie for the title of leading city in India, and I would have to say I much prefer Bombay. Bombay instantly makes you love it or hate it. It is smelly, horribly polluted and congested, crowded unlike anywhere else in India, and noisy, yet so intriguing and stimulating. As you walk around, there are dozens of interesting things on every block. You can sense that Bombay has received migrants from all over the country and has been heavily touched by the British and Portuguese. Things stay open late and there are distinct districts of the city, each with rich histories. It is in a very select class of cities, with company like New York or Mexico City. I didn’t stay in Delhi for too long and probably didn’t see the right parts of town since I was monument hopping. Nevertheless, my impression the whole time I was there that, in spite of being a city of 14 million, it didn’t have a whole lot going for it outside of the Mughal history and the fact that it is now the federal capital. In Bombay, almost immediately, I could feel the buzz of the city; in Delhi not so much. I guess I’ve developed a lot of civic pride for my adopted home in just two months.

After 2 days in Delhi, I was pleased with the time I had had but also ready to move on. The morning of my third day, I boarded the train to Agra.