A Labour of Love

This post is the first in a series about my recent trip to North East India. I was in Guwahati, the biggest city in the state of Assam, for a conference and managed to get a couple of days off to visit Shillong (the capital of Meghalaya) and nearby Cherapunjee district, on the border with Bangladesh. It is a VERY different India and definitely worthy of more than one post. We begin, out of chronological order, in Shillong.

Shillong is a former hill station that grew up around a small lake, and in colonial times was the capital of a much larger Assam province. It was famous for its half-timbered architecture that survives in parts, but it's seen rapid growth in recent years. And it shows - while the surrounding hills are lovely, the city itself feels like a place that has grown too much, too quickly, with central streets almost as crowded and chaotic as Old Delhi's (while also being mostly on pretty steep hills). While parts of Shillong are green and idyllic, others have a rather frontier town-like feel to them that caught me a bit off guard. It also has the biggest military presence I've yet seen in India - it's home to a huge base and there are a lot of soldiers on the streets (this being the North East of India, home to several insurgencies and separatist groups, security is tight). All of which contributed to a sometimes slightly on-edge atmosphere that I hadn't quite expected.

But it retains a charm that bigger cities in India lack, especially around the original lakeside settlement, and the skyline on a sunny day is colourful (if these days more dominated by concrete than half-timber).

Shillong is also home to a tiny museum of entomology that stands as a testament to one man's passion and his descendants' sense of duty. And let's get this out of the way: the museum has a name that you are not likely to forget very easily.

Now that you've done sniggering, let's get on with the blog. I'd read about this place in the Lonely Planet and was curious enough to seek it out even though it is tucked away on a side street and the map in the guide book was pretty much useless. More by luck than judgement I found it - a large but anonymous residential house with nothing but the above sign to indicate the existence of the museum. To get in you have to ring the doorbell. I felt a bit like a travelling salesman and half expected them to say "not today, thanks" and close the door in my face.

Anyway, they didn't. They showed me down to the basement where there is a large room filled with more butterflies, moths, beetles and assorted other crawly things than you can shake the proverbial stick at. The room itself is impressive, since the museum's founder (the eponymous Mr Wankhar) actually built the house specially so that he could have a hall large enough to store his collection. Mr Wankhar passed away some time ago, but his family maintain the museum in his memory.

It's an odd mixture of the quite extraordinary and rather sad. The vast array of unfortunate creatures is crammed into a few dozen display cases, with almost no accompanying information. Some look almost pristine; others have clearly seen much better days. Some are dazzling in their brilliance...

...while others make up in ick factor what they lack in incandescence.

Most of the cases aren't labelled at all. Those that are tend to give little more than the name of the creature contained within (though in several cases only one name was given for a display that seemed to contain quite different specimens). This one, however, couldn't help but make me think that the original creator of the collection hadn't been able to resist a sly dig at the retreating colonial powers:

I had an enjoyable twenty minutes or so peering at the various beasties, but was left in two minds about the place. On the one hand, it's admirable that the Wankhar family has maintained the facility as a public resource, especially for local people (a glance at the visitor book showed that most people who come are from Shillong). On the other, what was clearly a labour of love for its founder - who amassed a truly remarkable collection - seems now to be more of an obligation for his descendants, kept going in his memory out of duty rather than any passion for the subject. There's clearly been no expansion of the collection for years, and while their success in (mostly) preserving the collection in the humidity of Shillong is admirable, it must get harder and harder to prevent it declining.

But if it were, say, handed over to a professional museum, this would rob the people of Shillong of a unique and rather wonderful institution and a chance to appreciate the rich diversity of the area they live in. So for that reason alone I think the museum should stay as it is - a quirky hidden gem in a city that's a long way from the big-city cultural opportunities of Delhi or Mumbai. It's just rather nice to know that it exists at all.

Indira's shadow

Has there ever been a world leader whose appearance demanded attention as much as Indira Gandhi's? With that shock of black-and-white, Cruella de Vil hair, unmistakable nose, and fiercely intelligent eyes, hers was a face made to be on the front page of the newspaper if ever there was one. She died nearly 27 years ago, but her impact lives on in India - and not just through the fact that her family name remains the most powerful one in the country's politics.

She was assassinated at her home in Delhi, which has now been turned into a memorial to her and to her son, Rajiv, who succeeded her as Prime Minister in 1984 and was assassinated in his turn. My visit there today was a claustrophobic affair. The site of the martyrdom - for that's what it is seen as - of the nation's favourite daughter is a place of pilgrimage for Indians, who jostle and cram their way into the somewhat cramped exhibition halls - covered with newspapers spanning the decades of her career and Gandhi family photos - and have a habit of thrusting their mobile phones in front of the display you are looking at, in order to get a snap. It didn't allow for a great deal of peaceful contemplation of Indira's impact, but it shows just how large a figure she still looms in Indians' minds.

She was certainly an extraordinary figure. As a child she had to get used to the repeated incarceration of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was a leader of the Indian independence movement and became the country's first Prime Minister after the end of British rule. Her political awareness thus not only started young, it was personal right from the start - which maybe helps explain her later dictatorial tendencies. The photos and sketches of her from the time show a serious girl, with large, intense eyes that seem to hint at the remarkable life she was to lead:

She herself was imprisoned by the British - and, years later, by her political opponents in India. She served as Prime Minister for a total of fifteen years, including during Bangladesh's successful war of independence against Pakistan, in which India played a decisive role.

She was famous for her sharp political instincts, that helped her stay in power for so long, and must have cut an intimidating figure. She was fiercely committed to improving conditions for India's poor, and drove through the Green Revolution that allowed the country to feed itself. But she was also responsible for some of the darker moments of India's post-independence period, including a 21-month state of emergency (proclaimed on rather tenuous grounds) which allowed her to rule effectively by decree, and the event that would lead to her assassination, the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar in an effort to root out separatist Sikhs calling for the creation of an independent "Khalistan" in the Punjab.

Among Sikhs, unsurprisingly, she hardly cuts a popular figure, and she inspired unusual ire among her political opponents, as well as Richard Nixon (so she can't have been all bad). But for most Indians, she is remembered as a great national leader of a status comparable to her father. Unsurprising, then, that the memorial museum tends towards the hagiographical: the State of Emergency and the violence in Amritsar are brushed over, and no mention is made of the immediate aftermath of Indira's murder, when thousands of innocent Sikhs were killed - many burned alive - in revenge attacks across Delhi and elsewhere in India.

The museum displays her living quarters, preserved in her tasteful but rather spartan style, as well as the sari, bag and shoes she was wearing on the day she was shot by her Sikh bodyguards in revenge for the attack in Amritsar. The blood stains are clearly visible:

It might be trite to say that death is the great equalizer, but looking at this small collection, and her very ordinary bag and shoes, it's hard to associate them with one of the twentieth century's most important leaders or with an event that went on to shape - and destroy - thousands of lives. Rajiv's clothes at the time of his own murder seven years later are also on display, and have an altogether more shocking impact:

The violence of Rajiv's death - he was blown to pieces by a suicide bomber - is clear. For some reason though, it was the socks that moved me - oddly intact, just grubby, as though Rajiv had been out for a run and dumped them on the floor afterwards, and incongruous with the solemn museum setting.

Anyway, after musing on Indira's life and death, I made the ten minute walk to the spot where another Gandhi - even more famous than Indira - was also assassinated. The place where Mahatma Gandhi was killed is also preserved as a memorial, but was far less crowded than Indira's. This got me thinking about the meaning these two people - who were close personally but very different in their historical roles - have for the country today.

Others are much better qualified than me to judge, but to me the bigger crowds at Indira's memorial reflect the fact that for modern India, her shadow is longer than the Mahatma's. Mahatma Gandhi is, and always will be, an iconic figure internationally, and India continues to hold him up as a role model and one of the founding fathers of independent India. But for all that people profess to admire his ideals, few Indian public figures since then seem to follow them much.

Certainly his frugal lifestyle is not often followed by those Indians who have a choice in the matter. His condemnation of the oppression of women and of caste distinctions have not prevented them remaining widespread in India more than 60 years after his death. Even in my own area of vocational education his words sound at odds with prevailing attitudes here: Gandhi said that "instead of regarding craft and industry as different from education, I regard the former as the medium for the latter". That's not a popular view in a country where work-related education is still associated with low caste and low prestige in many circles.

I say this more in observation than condemnation, for if India had followed Gandhiism, I suspect it would be rather worse off now than it is. The pursuit of wealth may have created some very ugly inequalities, but it has also allowed for economic growth that has lifted millions out of poverty. Ultimately, Gandhi's asceticism was something he chose - because he was in a position to make that choice. Most Indians - like most people elsewhere - don't make that choice. It makes him an extraordinary person, and an admirable one, just as his approach to challenging British rule proved astonishingly effective. But it doesn't mean that his way is in any sense practical as long term public policy.

Indira, though, in her awareness of her own power, her willingness to use it and her belief - no less than Gandhi's - in the cause of India, seems to me to have more in common with the increasingly assertive and confident country India is today. That has some good consequences, and some potentially scary ones - the India-Pakistan relationship being top of the list of the latter.

Modern India, nuclear-armed, accustomed to sabre-rattling and struggling with rampant graft, seems to have a politics that owes little to peaceful, self-denying Mahatma Gandhi. In this, I guess it is little different to the rest of the world - where he is held up an admired as an inspiration, but where politics dance largely to a different tune. One that Indira knew better.

National museum artefacts 5: a guest appearance

Haven't done one of these in a while, but I still have a good few things worthy of comment (and am planning a return trip to the museum before too long!).

Anyway, one of the joys of the museum is its section on Indian miniature paintings. They're fascinating portraits of life in a vanished society - the court of the Mughal rulers of Delhi who preceded the arrival of the British. They are particularly interesting because the Mughals were Muslim, but their art features some of the loveliest renditions of the human form you are ever likely to see - not normally something associated with Islamic art (they were also responsible for some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, including the Taj Mahal). The paintings don't really lend themselves to casual photographing, but you can see some lovely examples here.

One of the examples listed there really intrigued me, and it was this one:

At first sight the main thing you notice is the beautiful gold leaf script and decoration surrounding the central portrait, which represents one of the Mughal emperors, Jahangir (1605-27). The portrait itself is revealing: you might expect an early 17th century emperor of Persian and Mongolian stock to be depicted as a warrior, but what we see is a sensitive and artistic-looking young man - clearly someone who valued culture above conquest (despite this, he apparently enlarged the empire significantly during his tenure as top banana). But when you go for a closer look at Jahangir you notice that what he is holding is a bit unexpected:

She gets everywhere, doesn't she?

Yep, it's the virgin Mary, in the familiar meek-and-holy posture in which she is depicted in churches across the Christian world. But what's she doing in a portrait of an Islamic ruler, far distant from the nearest centre of Christianity?

Turns out we have a Brit to thank for this, though one who shared his culture with India in a rather less brutal way than his successors. Thomas Roe came to Jahangir's court as ambassador for King James I in 1615, bringing with him several paintings with Christian themes. Clearly they caught Jahangir's eye to the extent that he commissioned the above portrait.

This fascinates me for what it says about the culture of the court in Delhi at the time. In England, we'd recently had Elizabeth's persecution of Catholics (and Queen Mary's persecution of protestants before that), and we still had jolly old Olly Cromwell, that paragon of religious tolerance, to come. But in Islamic Delhi, the emperor was having himself painted with an icon of a foreign religion (actually, interesting question: I know Jesus is recognised as a prophet by Islam, but anyone know what it has to say about Mary?).

Of course the Mughals also pulled off the rather unusual feat of ruling for centuries over an empire that was overwhelmingly of a different religion to them, apparently without serious efforts to covert their subjects (though they had wars aplenty with neighbouring Hindu dynasties). The contrast with the ruthless efforts to suppress dissenting religious views in England (and elsewhere in Europe) at the time is striking, and shows just how recent an arrival tolerance is to our now-cosmopolitan society.

National museum artefacts 4: Flummoxed

I'm feeling a bit lazy and unimaginative tonight (still in that weather-induced funk I blogged about yesterday) so it's another trip to the national museum I'm afraid. Tell me if these are boring you. However this one really is intriguing.

OK, so the information for this one explains that it is "King Narsimha worshiping Jagannatha", and that it dates from the 13th century in Orissa (on the east coast of India). Fine, you think. I guess that's the king on the right, and some sort of divine flunky in the middle who's lost his head. And on the left...

Well, yes, on the left. What's on the left? There are a couple of thrones, on one of which sits a female figure, and on the other one, well, let's have a look:

And a bit of a closer one:

My thought at this point was: What the hell is that? My best explanation was that at some point, SpongeBob Square Pants traveled back in time to 13th century Orissa and was immortalised as a god by local artist.

I've since looked the god up on Wikipedia, and apparently this is just what he looks like. In his most famous temple at Puri, Jagannatha "has a massive square head with the chest merging into one piece of wooden stump without any demarcation of the neck. The arms have been inserted in a line with the upper lip." In other words, Jagannatha is a god who looks like an ice cream cone with a face.

Against the better known pantheon of India's gods, all gorgeous figures with multiple limbs in lithe dancing postures, this definitely seems like a bit of an oddity - and without wishing to be disrespectful, a little bit comic. But then, when you've got this many gods, I guess some are bound to turn out a little bit unconventional.

National museum artefacts 3: Buffalo on a skateboard

I'm a BUFFALO! On a SKATEBOARD! Yeah!

Well, that just seems to me to be the kind of thing a buffalo on a skateboard would say.

National Museum artefacts 2: frankly disturbing

I mean, this was probably disturbing enough before it lost its limbs. But....yikes.

National Museum artefacts 1: the oversized chair

It's raining today. Not just a monsoon flash-in-a-pan downpour, but a steady stream that's English in is constancy and Indian in its heaviness. Outside my window the street is already flooded (note to Sheila Dikshit: now that the Metro is such a success, how about focusing on the city's drainage system?).

So I think I will be staying home today. Happily, as I mentioned in my last post, I've stored up plenty of things to blog about, not least the brilliant National Museum, which, displaying though it does but a tiny fraction of the country's artistic and cultural heritage (and short though it is on explanatory displays) is one of the most fascinating museums I've been to in a while.

Originally I was going to snap some of the more interesting exhibits and put them all in a single post, but I got quite carried away and took photos of well over a dozen. So I'm going to drip feed them into the blog in a series of short posts which will make me look like a seriously prolific blogger. I hope you find this vaguely interesting!

Most of the museum's prize exhibits are on the ground floor, but I'm going to start with something that is tucked away on the top floor. It grabbed me from the moment I saw it and still fascinates me with questions. It was in a section ambiguously entitled "ethnic art", which I think means it comes from one of the tribal areas in Central-Eastern India. But there was absolutely no information to accompany it whatsoever, leaving me to conjecture about its possible origin and meaning.

When I first saw it I actually thought it was some strange kind of chariot with two people at the reins. It's made of metal and the figures perched on the edge combined with the dangling circles of metal shapes at the back and the little animal figures made me think of the Sharmanka kinetic theatre I saw recently in Glasgow (by the way, if you're ever in Glasgow do go and see that, it's really incredible).

But then I realised that if this thing were to lurch into life like Sharmanka's creations, it would be going nowhere - the figures are perched on the edge of a chair that's far too large for them (the whole thing is a little bit larger than a regular dining room chair). Why? What's the significance of what they are holding (the male figure on the right has an axe, the female on the left a basket)? Why is the male's arm lowered and the female's raised?

There are so many little details to enjoy. The little birds perched behind the couple, looking back at the viewer (you can see one just above the female figure's raised arm); the incredible decoration of the female figure's ears; the calm and somewhat complacent expression on the faces.

I kind of wish there had been some information about the piece. But at the same time it's fun to be able to use your imagination a bit about what it all means (I'm going with some kind of wedding celebration). And it's just an extraordinary thing to look at.