Surviving Delhi

That's Delhi. When life gets too much for you all you need to do is to spend an hour at Nigambodh Ghat, watch the dead being put into flames and hear their kin wail for them. Then come home and down a couple pegs of whisky. In Delhi, death and drink make life worth living.

- Khushwant Singh, Delhi A Novel (1990) 

Project IIAIW - II

When I initiated Project IIAIW (read It Is, As It Was), I was uncertain how long it would be before i would yet again come across a historical passage that would feel as if it was written today. So, I am quite thrilled to reproduce this passage from Willy Dalrymple's The Last Mughal. It is almost too easy to replace the principal characters cited here (fanatic wahhabis and militant missionaries) with any of the fundamentalist groups that operate today. About a 100 years have passed since Aurangzeb's death (the context for the first IIAIW post), and instead of the Mughals it is the British star which is in ascendancy. Listen:

Acting on a tip-off, they conducted a dawn raid on the premises of various known extremists and found evidence for what they believed was "a Wahhabi conspiracy' in Delhi itself, seizing the correspondence of the Fanatic Moulvies who were preaching a crusade against the british. The figure at the centre of the 'conspiracy' was Shaikh Hussain Baksh, a prominent Delhi trader from the Punjabi merchant community who was closely associated with the more radical imams of the Madrasa-i-Rahimiyya circle.

It was again the ulema of the same radical madras that had led the opposition to Jennings and his missionaries, especially when after the baptism of Ramchandra and Chaman Lal, Padre Jennings succeeded, in May 1853, in converting an unnamed Sayyid of 'good family'. If the missionaries reinforced Muslim fears, increasing opposition to British rule, driving the orthodox towards greater greater orthodoxy and creating a constituency for the jihadis, so the existence of Wahhabi conspiracies strengthened the conviction of Jennings and his supporters that a strong attack was needed to take on such deeply embedded muslim fanatics.

The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and European imperialism have very often been very closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but concrete way, the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides  the lifeblood of the other.

- Dalrymple, W., The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 (2006), Penguin Books 

Project IIAIW

An artist's impression of Akbar's imperial court

In this Financial Times article published in January, '12, Arundhati Roy writes of an insidious, incestuous "gush-up gospel" that, like creepers on the wall, is choking sunlight out of "trickle down effect", a sophist alibi that had currency for far too long. Her voice, dramatic and breathless, has the feel of a great news exposé. Which, of course, it is. 

Yet, reading Abraham Eraly's saga of the Mughals, The Peacock Throne, it seems to me that her piece, as timely it is, is also timeless. I had earlier posted an extract from Naipaul's 1977 book India: A Wounded Civilization, where he writes with the prescience of a sage (and the tongue of a shrew) about the roiling turbulence and disarray of India's institutions. Between Eraly and Naipaul, I am reminded of something Greimas (or was it Barthes) said: "All stories have been told". To corrupt that phrase - All analyses have been made. Nothing new remains to be said. And so i embark on Project IIAIW or Project IT IS, AS IT WAS. Every time I read something written before my birth brimming with "current-ness", i will post it. And I would be delighted if you would contribute similar writing. 

Today, we read from Eraly.

This was plain to see. But few could see the obvious, being blinded by the glitter of the Mughal emperor's mountainous hoard of gold and gems, his marble palaces, the peacock throne, the Taj. But behind the shimmering imperial façade, there was another scene, another life - people in mud hovels, their lives barely distinct from those of animals, wretched, half naked, half starved, and from whom every drop of sap had been wrung out by their predatory masters, Muslim as well as Hindu. Only chieftains and amirs fattened, and kings lived like kings.

Not surprisingly, at the height of Mughal splendor under Shah Jahan, over a quarter of the gross national product of the empire was appropriated by just 655 individuals, while the bulk of the approximately 120 million people of India lived on a dead level of poverty. No one gave a thought to their plight. Famine swept the land every few years, devouring hundreds of thousands of men, and in its wake came, always and inevitably, pestilence, devouring several hundreds of thousands more. In Mughal India, the contrast between legend and reality was grotesque.

- Eraly, A. The Peacock Throne: The Saga of Great Mughals (2000), Penguin Books India 

Reclaiming the Narrative

[An edited version of this piece was first published in MINT LOUNGE on Feb 25th, 2012]

By Abhijit Dutta




I am sitting in a doubtful looking van, a Toyota Hi-Ace that bears all the traces of a hard, unforgiving life. Outside my window are fresh faced paddy fields, its innocent green submerged waist deep in water. Narrow trails snake through the fields, stopping at houses that stand on stilts and cower under roofs made from sugar palm leaves. I spy a man sitting on his haunches, alternately blowing and stirring a blackened pot. His body is lithe, the labour of an under developed economy sculpted onto his sinewy muscles.

I have just landed in Siem Reap, a place made famous for its proximity to Angkor, an archaeological site strewn with remains of the Khmer Empire. It is a popular destination: well over 2 million international visitors pass through the petite Siem Reap International Airport annually. The news that I will be visiting had led to several oohs and aahs from colleagues who had recently been. They all wanted to go back; their first trips had been magical. One of them, an American, had lowered her voice to a whisper and told me “it will change your life. I know it did mine. I have never quite seen anything like it. It was am-ay-zing”


As the van carried me through the road – an undulating stretch of red soil polka dotted with potholes – I begin to worry. Did I board the wrong flight? Had I gotten off at the wrong stop? Where on earth was this dream destination, the exotic charmer that everyone promised would take my breath away? I am in Siem Reap, Cambodia, but I could well be in Bankura, West Bengal. And that is a problem because my parents who joined me on this trip traveled from Kolkata, where they live, to Singapore, where I live, from where we flew into Cambodia. And now Cambodia looked like all those places that train journeys of my childhood took me through. About an hour before the Rajdhani Express would pull into Howrah, the scene outside would compose to a similar tableau of paddy fields and muddy dykes, well browned naked children running next to my window, fighting each other to claim my plastic water bottles. It was my cue that I was home. But right now, having sunk a kilo of rupees and many planning hours, home was really not what I was looking forward to!


For our stay, I had picked an eco resort called Sojourn (“for journeys of an entirely different nature”) that offered boutique villas away from the backpacker and tourist heavy ‘downtown’. It’s a refreshing sort of place, sitting as it does in the heart of Treak village, a settlement of 200 odd families. Around it, bulbous lotuses grow wild, roosters, ducks and swans troop around without a care in the world, rain fed ponds brim with goings on of water snakes, spawn and insects, and thickets are heavy with fruits and vegetables.


And yet, we found ourselves struggling to enjoy this ‘sylvan scape’, niggled as we were with the thought: did we travel this far to see a village?


The next day, at Angkor Wat, our English speaking tour guide tried to explain to us stories of Lord Vishnu, of seven hooded nagas and nubile apsaras, of devas and asuras, all etched into intricate bas-reliefs of the nearly thousand year old temples. “And that, you see with beard, is Indian high priest, Saa-dhoo” he says. “We know” my father tells him.


The merits of Angkor Wat, Bayon and Baphuon, the three main temple complexes in Angkor are of course obvious. These are some of the oldest monuments that exist in the world, and yet display a sophistication of architectural design that would put to shame any contemporary creation. These are ambitious structures, built over decades, combining an understanding of mythology, religion, statecraft, architecture and the importance of massaging a King’s ego into a powerful amalgam of stone and sculpture. A group of foreigners who stood near us could barely breathe with astonishment. Only the distraction of even more bizarre stories about Brahma, Vishnu, and Maheshwara could nudge them past their disbelief of exactly how ancient and how grand these temples were.


To us, it felt like someone was teaching us how to count. For every fragment of history our guide, Sokha, had memorized, my father would fill in the details, gently correcting him. Even my sketchy knowledge of mythology, grounded in Ramanand Sagar teleserials, seemed advanced. I felt cheated.


Later, sitting underneath the stern gaze of a stone faced Jayavarman VII in Bayon, a temple inspired by Buddha (or Brahma, if you prefer) in Angkor Thom, I wonder if my holiday was being ruined by the lot of travel narratives I carried on my back.


As an urban, English speaking Indian, my idea of travel is borrowed. From the adventures of Phileas Fogg and Passepartout as they traveled Around the World in Eighty Days to the incredible Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, my childhood was littered with stories that promised distance led to a different world. Tintin offered clear proof of this, his travels to the Land of the Soviets, to the Land of Incas, to the Red Sea, even to moon, came illustrated with never before seen vistas and experiences far removed from his home (or mine). In fact, even home looked different when seen through Kim’s eyes, thanks to Kipling. In later years, Graham Greene, Paul Theroux and Jack Kerouac confirmed this understanding of travel with their epic journeys and discoveries of the strange, the weird and the different.


In Siem Reap, I realize, this is a curse. The “narrative of difference” is really an alien – western - construct that is grounded in the fact that, historically, only the privileged could travel. It was only the men of great colonial empires of the last millennium – the British, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish – who could hop onto their ships and set sail to unknown lands, or rather, lands unknown to them. Travel was always about new discoveries they made, about places they never imagined existed.


And so travel writing came to be located in the imaginative territories of the European - and in the last century, American - establishing an idiom that continues to govern the structure of contemporary travel narratives. It is typically the big name western publications that could afford to send its writers out into the great unknown, new age Ibn-e-Battutas dispatched to dark corners of the world, to tell readers back home how different the rest of the world looked. Writers now thronged the jungles of India, the peaks of Hindukush, the rivers of China, the pastures of Mongolia, the villages of Mekong, and yes, the temples of Angkor. They returned with extraordinary stories of people in mud huts and palaces, of bizarre mythologies and alien palates, of prosperity and poverty, of stereotypes and caricatures, of riotous colors and a joie de vivre that knocked the wind out of their reader’s pipes. As Edward Said writes in his introduction to Orientalism, these narratives rendered this other part of the world as a “place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories, landscapes, and remarkable experiences” You just have to read Theroux’s iconic The Great Railway Bazaar or see Michael Palin’s Himalaya to learn how utterly cinematic (and strange) our otherwise ordinary backyards can be.


Publishers and editors here, bereft of travel budgets and any significant pool of good travel writers, gladly reproduced these narratives for the local population. We consumed stories about our own lands written up in evocative prose that transformed our daily lives into an incredibly thrilling experience. Asia became a theme park and we all bought tickets.


To be fair, this “narrative of difference” is a defining colonial legacy that affected all cultural expression, not just travel; be it architecture, fine arts, music, film, fiction or dance (this to a lesser extent, the traveling repertories of Uday Shankar and Birju Maharaj having already created an Indian narrative and context for itself, globally). But while several of these cultural forms have now found firmly Indian narratives to express themselves, particularly film and fine art, travel writing has lagged woefully behind. And so we continue to have to look to the westerner to help imagine our travel choices and endorse our itineraries, or worse, to his spitting image - the coconut class, the native elite - who, in Sartre’s memorable worlds, have the same “grand, glutinous words stuck to their teeth”


Perhaps it is unfair to expect it any other way; after all we don’t know any better. The only types of travel the average Indian knows revolves around pilgrimages, weddings and, more recently, business with fixed agendas. The idea of recreational travel, the idea that summer holidays and vacations could mean something other than going back home - that travel could be for its sake - has created the need for charting a whole new unfamiliar space, and the availability of international travel writing at the nearest bookstore (whose primary audience remained western) is a comforting crutch. Till as recently as 2010, magazines such as Lonely Planet and Condénast Traveler were only available as UK or US editions and even now a fair bit remains syndicated.


The fact is there is no Indian travel writer worth the mention. Even revered travel writers of Indian origin, like VS Naipaul and Pico Iyer, offer a mostly foreign gaze characteristic of their non-resident status. It is revealing that India’s best known resident travel writer is an Englishman – William Dalrymple – whose City of Djinns regularly outsells Khushwant Singh’s Delhi. More recently, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City created some hope of an authentic Indian travel narrative, but is yet to dislodge Gregory Roberts’ definitive Mumbai book - Shantaram - from the popular imagination, for, readers, just as much as writers and travelers, are victims of this neo-Orientalist travel discourse. Like Said argues, so authoritative is this western articulation of Asia (and the Middle East and Africa) that “no one writing, thinking or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism”


However, this discourse is beginning to fissure. According to PATA, India has one of the fastest growing outbound travel markets in the world, with approximately 12 million outbound travelers this year and trending to 50 Million by 2020. This means that sooner rather than later, as more and more India’s travel to distant shores, SiemReapian dissonances will become a hallmark of our travel experience.


Take the idea of Summers for example. The idea of “glorious”, “sun filled” summers spent outdoors getting a “high colour” or a “brilliant tan” is grounded in a climatic reality: the western hemisphere is subjected to bitter winters for almost 4-5 months every year. The onset of summers then is indeed something to welcome and travel magazines right to eulogize its many benefits.


Traveling to Helsinki last June, I stared in dismay at hordes of Finns, sweat streaking their faces, drunk on joy of 23 hour days steaming at 30 degrees Celsius (remember there is limited ventilation, a precaution for the winter). It’s the hottest summer Finland has seen in years and they just couldn’t get enough of it. Having traveled from a city that makes me sweat practically every day of the year (if it is not toasting me with dry heat) to see the magic of the Nordic, of being in the Arctic Circle, I was crestfallen. If only I had been seduced by travel writing exulting the charms of a white Christmas in the border town of Imatra, or the Believe-it-or-not temperatures of Lapland, and encouraged me to ditch the “best time to go”, to travel when its bone biting cold and frozen over.


Is it really possible for tourism departments and tour guides to rethink and reframe their spiels in culture specific contexts? Can the ancientness of Angkor be referenced to the 14th century ruins of the Vijayanagara empire in Hampi or the 13th century Konark Sun temple in Orissa – narratives that allow us to marvel at the shared ancestry, the linked histories? Can the Tonle Sap, a central feature of Cambodia’s cartography and the largest freshwater lake in SE Asia, presently framed in an exploitative narrative that features floating destitution – high end DSL cameras prying into and objectifying the heartbreaking poverty resident in the houseboats – shift instead to the immensity and fertility of the Great Lake itself? As a culture that grows up to respect rivers and lakes as sources of sustenance and spiritual deliverance, are we not uniquely placed to appreciate lives lived in perpetuity by the banks of the Great Lake? Free from the distractions of “white guilt”, can we not instead delight in the fact that the green coconuts here are of spectacular size and their taste sweetest in all of Asia? Or that wild lotuses growing effortlessly in Siem Reap’s villages would be considered a prize pick anywhere? Can we not get a little closer, penetrate a little deeper, discard the differences and instead celebrate the nuances on offer?


On one of our rest days in Siem Reap (being “templed out” in Angkor is as real as altitudinal sickness), my mother and I sign up for a Khmer cooking class. As it happens, it begins to rain furiously and our ‘classmates’ decide to stay inside. And so we begin cooking, just the chef and us.


The ingredients are immediately familiar – these are things my mother cooks with everyday – and prompts detailed conversations on the right texture and the particular varieties. Notes are exchanged on the constituents of the curry powder and the conversation seamlessly shifts to what people really use at home that flavours the cooking. We leave the sanitized experience that had been planned for us and arrive at the chef’s home where we settle down to some real Khmer cooking. It’s not awkward at all, the familiarity of our skin color and our ease at being inside a hut allowing a natural intimacy.


My last day is kept for a sunrise at Angkor Wat, but I arrive a little too early and my driver, Mr. Sary, suggests we head out to Banteay Srei, a 10th century Hindu temple, about 32 kilometers from Angkor. We speed through the ink blue pre-dawn, a light rain pattering onto the windscreen and arrive at Banteay Srei just as the sky dissolves to a mysterious grey. It’s barely 6 AM, we are the only ones here.


Mr. Sary, a soft spoken man of 60 odd years, takes me around the tiny temple, the only one built with pink stone (most being in red sandstone), and we stare at the clefts left behind where shiva lingas should have been (“stolen, all stolen” he says). We spend some time sitting by the statues of monkeys and then come out for a cup of Cambodian coffee that we buy from a stall he knows. He talks about his days as a guerrilla fighter for the Cambodian People’s Party, the years he spent in the forest fighting Pol Pot’s men, the great coffee the Vietnamese would bring in from across the border. His eyes moisten as he talks about his pregnant aunt being killed in front of the family, about how angry he felt. “But now is all over. My country has peace” he says, “the young build new country”. On our way back we stop at Ta Prohm, more famous as the “Angelina Jolie temple” having been cast in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Standing atop a pile of rubble that’s been there for 900 years, I stare in disbelief at the spung tree that holds the temple in a stranglehold, its unimaginably thick roots snaking around the entire complex. (Incidentally, Jolie’s connection with this place is just as entangled as the spung tree – her eldest son, Maddox, is Cambodian).


Mr. Sary knows by now to not bother with a historical description, and instead tells me of the erstwhile king cobra burrow in the temple (“Now no more, eaten already”). He has been coming here since he was 6 years old, and he takes me through completely dark pathways and past areas cordoned off for restoration work (the guards are from his village, he tells me with a smile), giving me a closer look at Ta Prohm’s moss kissed beauty.


In the end, I did succumb to the charm of Siem Reap. Throughout my trip, memories from my travels to West Bengal, to Orissa, to Kerela and Karnataka came back to me, but instead of lessening, it enhanced my appreciation. Without the distraction of differences I could rest my mind on the essential, teasing out more meaning than my colleagues promised.


Sometimes, to see our own existences recreated in another canvas, with a patina of colors we recognize but perhaps not use ourselves, can create some of the most memorable travel experiences. No, Siem Reap didn’t change my life, but it was a pretty amazing trip. 

The Perfect Back-up Plan

Photograph by Hashim Badani

                                       

By Abhijit Dutta

[First published in Lonely Planet Magazine India (Feb, 2012)]

Singapore, as we all know, is lovely. Sumptuous shopping, endless gourmandizing, chic clubbing - all wrapped up in a nice little ribbon and a Vanda Miss Joaquim orchid on top. Undoubtedly, much merry can be made here and no number of days spent making it are too many. 

But. 

If you find yourself wondering whether you really can hot foot it to Orchard Road for the 5th day in a row, or catch yourself staring at the dizzying sprawl of roulette machines at Resorts World without a gleam in the eye, or - shock horror - can’t bring yourself to consume another plate of chicken rice, then you know it’s time for a back-up plan. At 50 minutes from Singapore and a time lag of an hour, arriving in Bintan feels a bit like time travel. The rather dramatic shift in landscape - from the geometric deformities of Marina Bay Sands to the soft sand and blue expanse of South China Sea - is almost instant. The nasi goreng you bought from Tanah Merah ferry terminal is likely still unfinished, and you have barely turned your head away from the foul image of oil tankers and cargo ships crowding Singapore’s coast that the horizon begins to swarm with islands: big islands, small islands, pretty islands, scruffy islands, islands with names and islands without, islands that look like amoebas with green mohawks and islands that form perfect teardrops. And, just like that, you  are in the heart of Riau archipelago, Indonesia. 

With some 3000 odd islands strewn around the south china sea, to the east of Sumatra and South of Singapore, the Riau islands (of which the Riau archipelago is a part, along with the Tudjuh archipelago and the Lingga islands) is a curious mix of uninhabited islands, hyperactive tourist hives, industrial complexes, bustling port towns, mining havens, uber chic private islands, startlingly beautiful coral reefs and waters that are known only by seafaring nomads who have lived off these wild wild waters for at least 8 centuries. 

Though you can no longer tell, these islands were once the heart of Malay sultanates that ruled everything between Sumatra and Borneo. As the major thoroughfare on the lucrative spice-route, these islands became the power centre of the Malay world, with a string of sultans, overlords and western colonial powers trying to fold it into their empires or set up political capitals. Much of the attention was reserved for the largest island of the Riau archipelago - Bintan - and everybody from the Sultan of Johor-Riau (who also counted the much smaller Singapore among his many territories), the Sultan of Malacca, the Chinese, the Dutch, the British, the indigenous Bugis to even sea pirates tried to make a grab for it. 

Today, more than potentates or pirates, Bintan is likely to be held ransom by tourists who arrive by the boatloads, seeking respite from Singapore.  The majority of those who set foot on it will only know an overdeveloped strip on its northern coast called Lagoi Bay and spend a weekend at one of the many resort properties that line the beachfront. Each is a self contained theme destination and so the resort you pick becomes the entirety of your experience: lavish pool villas at the Banyan Tree for a luxe couples retreat, the seaside golf resorts for a boy’s day out on the 18-hole, the boisterous Club Med for extended poolside bonding with the kids, the homey Nirwana Gardens for a family reunion and the spa haven Angsana for some intense R&R. Whichever resort you choose, you will find yourself in a cocoon of sun warmed pools, extended lunches and tropical cocktails that erase all memory of stress or Singapore. Throw in some beach time, a spot of kayaking or shallow water snorkelling, maybe even a firefly spotting night tour through the Sebung river and you have no excuse to leave Lagoi Bay. 

And yet, if you do decide to rouse yourself from this sunny, slothful stupor and drive out of the deceptively insular resorts enclave, there is much to soak in. 

On my second day in Bintan i was headed southwards to an ubiquitous icon visible from all corners of the island. At just 360 meters above sea level, Gunung Bintan, or simply Bintan Mountain, is a squat little hill that wears a rainforest for a poncho and looks utterly huggable. Once inside, you are immediately lost in a world whose charms are entirely in its ordinariness, its lived nature. You see the forest bulge with the good stuff - mangosteens and jackfruits for the kids, numnum fruits for the pregnant woman, rattan trees to make baskets and furniture, pandan leaves to weave sleeping mats - and you know this is not a mountain you climb for the summit view. Gunung Bintan is an essential part of village life and climbing its mossy trails you become a part of it too. The steep slopes are an excuse to stop often, catch your breath, gulp some water and talk to your guide - likely a local who climbs it every other day without breaking a sweat. On your way down, join the village boys for a communal splash in the waterfall and feel happy that you have washed a few calories away. 

Another 40 minutes of driving eastwards will take you to Trikora beach, the rare public beach in Bintan that reminds you that you are after all in Indonesia, and that Bintan is not merely a beachy disneyland reserved for foreigners. Locals from around Bintan have been driving down to this relatively secluded beach for years, with backpackers transiting through the island their only company. In recent years, Trikora too has seen the rise of resorts and increasingly its fishing villages and kampong huts are jostling with guesthouses and hotels, but it still remains a place where you catch some fresh air, meet the locals and stitch yourself an authentic experience. If all this sounds much too quotidian for your taste and you would much rather your back-up plan was made of something decidedly more indulgent, consider checking into one of the three private islands that lie moored around mainland Bintan. Away from the package tours and fixed itineraries, crowded pools and breakfast queues, these are some of the world’s most exclusive getaways. Nikoi Island, 8 kms off the east coast, is a breezy catamaran ride from a private jetty near Trikora village. Spread over 15 hectares of beach and rainforest, it appears out of nowhere, wearing the glittering South China Sea around its neck, and immediately convinces you that life should entirely consist of contemplating bright blue seas and drinking Yogi’s coladas with white sand shifting beneath your feet. 

Yogi - private butler cum bartender cum everything you want him to be - is among the more conspicuous charms of Nikoi; his many merits include pouring much too much rum in your drinks, distracting your kids with a wildly popular treasure hunt and whittling bows and arrows out of fallen branches as instant souvenirs. 

“He is part of the furniture” says Tony the Manager, pointing to Yogi’s rear (which really does look like it belongs to a rather famous bear) swinging on the arms of a deckchair shaped from driftwood. Much of the Nikoi property is built up with materials curated from nearby islands and exudes an authentic organic aura - be it the design of the 15 sea front huts that blend into the island’s texture, or the conch shell and coral decor that punctuates the place. The swimming pool is nestled amongst stunning rock formations and you get the feeling that you are tucked away in a natural cove on some secret islet. A natural cove with a bar service, of course. More than anything else, Nikoi gives you a sense of freedom, to run off and play without a care in the world. It’s the perfect break for kids growing up in cloistered urban spaces - to know clear waters and white sand, to plot their own adventures, to get lost and to never have to wear shoes. 

If Nikoi is great for kids, Pulau Joyo (smaller and more intimate than Nikoi) is where the adults come to play. Handcrafted by Antony Marden, a shipping magnate who counts futuristic super yachts and island clusters among his playthings, Joyo is a private den of an island. The bar is yours to tend and, if you want, you get to pick the tunes as well, making it the perfect place for a bachelorette’s party or a debauched weekend. The island has mostly been left alone, with the only “constructions” being beach huts - all wood and alang-alang (dried grass) - and a large pavilion outfitted with antiques from flea markets around the world, including some outrageously handsome doors from Bali, a wildebeest carved from driftwood and a bewildered looking rust iron lionfish.  It’s classic Survivor Chic. 

Pangkil pre-dates both Nikoi and Joyo and is the original “private” island. It’s the only one among the three that you have to book out in its entirety, irrespective of numbers in the party. Despite being nearly a decade old, it remains a popular choice. Kate, an American expat living in Singapore tells me she has been back 8 times - “Pangkil is an annual affair. These kids have literally grown up here” she says, waving at a large brood absorbed in a game of handball. Admittedly, there are nice touches one can get used to: photogenic sunsets, cosy tree houses, bamboo beds and a hot donut ritual that you have got to love. 

Perhaps just as ‘private’ as these is the very public island of Senggarang in west Bintan, but it’s a whole different style. A short drive from Tanjung Pinang (the capital of Bintan and it’s largest town) it is home to the tightly knit chinese minority community. Unlike the expat crowd on the private islands, it’s the locals who live it up here (and have been, for over 300 years). It’s a community that has always huddled together and despite the passage of time and the fact that they speak fluent indonesian, they retain a fiercely distinct chinese character. Even other local indonesians are infrequent visitors. The “attraction” in Senggarang is an old banyan tree strangling an equally old buddhist temple but its charms lie elsewhere. I arrive on a Sunday (“lazy day” says Natalis, my guide) and find the village brushed over with sepia tints and yellowed edges.  Along a narrow sun splashed walkway that joins rows of wistful looking stilt houses, aunties with faces more gnarled than roots of a banyan tree smile toothless smiles and poke away at their open woks and tea stoves. Men play interminable rounds of chinese chess, chain smoking cheap cigarettes. We too decide to pay our respects to “lazy day” and sit down at a table beside them with our too sweet kopis and crunchy batter fried fresh fish. 

From Senggarang, Natalis and i hire a sampan (fisherman’s boat) to take us through the winding Sungai Ular, a river blinkered with mangroves. Tucked away in these secluded tracts is a chinese temple no longer on the tourist itinerary. Once there, i take in the view from the courtyard and wonder why. The temple itself is ordinary and like any other buddhist temple but the view alone - leaping off as it does from the courtyard to the sea below, framing Tanjung Pinang in a palette of pastels - is worth the detour. I ask Natalis how he discovered the place and he tells me a couple of American backpackers in the late 80’s had read about it in a Lonely Planet guidebook and made him row down the Sungai Ular in its search. Seeing me surprised that this little pocket of peace should remain so off the radar, he shrugs: “no more backpackers now. Only suitcases” 

I still have a few hours left before i catch my ferry back to Singapore and i decide to do a quick hop to Penyengat. A tiny island, Penyengat has more history than most of Riau. A becak ride (a bike-trishaw) around the island reveals crumbling fortresses, hollowed palaces and revered graveyards. Penyengat was once home to the powerful Riau kings and legend has it that most of the locals are royal descendants. With that thought on my mind, I tip my becak driver handsomely - after all, one must stand by his king even when the chips are down. 

I finish off my trip with a coffee at Cafe Puncak, which sits perched on the highest point in Tanjung Pinang.  From here, the town coalesces at your feet, the asbestos roofs of brightly colored houses creating a broad brushstroke on the riau sea. Tanjung Pinang was once a swinging city, luring sea men and traders from Singapore and around to dance away a night, to gamble and score with prostitutes. Since then, things have changed. Today Pinang has the comfort of a small town vibe, its horizons skimming over hoary villages like Senggarang, over mangroves and lost temples, and past royal relics before disappearing into silhouettes of mountains crowded with trees that will never know any landscaping. Tanjung Pinang is a reminder that you could travel far sipping coffees on rugged terraces, feet on stool, looking vacuously at the goings on of seas and rivers, reminder that travel is not always about movement. 

It’s a reminder one is likely to forget the moment you clear immigration in Singapore. Back into bright lights and crowded streets there will always be much to do - things to see, places to go. But if ever it gets too much and you just want to catch your breath, you know you have the perfect back-up plan. 

Writing (was) on the wall

[Illustration by Kathryn Rathke; taken from The Economist's Intelligent Life blog]

"The turbulence in India this time hasn't come from foreign invasion or conquest; it has been generated from within. India cannot respond in her old way, by a further retreat into archaism. Her borrowed institutions have worked like borrowed institutions; but archaic India can provide no substitutes for press, parliament and courts. The crisis of India is not only political or economic. The larger crisis is of a wounded old civilization that has at last become aware of its inadequacies and is without the intellectual means to move ahead"

- V S Naipaul, INDIA: A Wounded Civilization (1977)

The Break-up

[Photo by Graham Turner of The Guardian; taken from an article by Andrew Anthony, published January, 2009]

By Abhijit Dutta

As if the fisticuffs between lunatic fundamentalists and indignant liberals, the roiling dissonance between the moderate muslims and the hindu right, and the heightened condescensions between lawless writers and self censoring ones weren’t enough, L’Affaire Rushdie à JLF is now threatening to sour another rather celebrated relationship - that of the No-Matter-What liberal (NMW-L) and the Not-So-Moderate muslim (NSM-M)

And if you eavesdrop on their conversation - in the corridors of Facebook or Twitter - you can hear their break-up talk.

“You are hypocrite” says the NMW-L

“But why yaar” asks the NSM-M

“What yaar - you are all ready to protest when its M F Husain but Rushdie pe baat aayi toh phat li?”

“It’s different”

“How is it different? Tell me, how is it different? He painted naked hindu goddesses and you were all for freedom of expression and what not. Now he calls Mahomet Mahound, calls his harem brothel and you have a problem? Kaisa chalega boss?”

And you know all is not well with the central provision of the social contract between the NMW-L and the NSM-M: Reciprocative Liberalism. I promise to not be offended if you promise to not be offended.

The argument is no more sophisticated than the one you may hear housewives make to each other: we eat their eid offerings, why can’t they eat my prashad. "We celebrate everything - X-mas, eid-ul-fitr, diwali, sab kuchh, why can’t they celebrate our festivals"

And it is hard to fault them: as polytheistic hindus, used to pantheons stocking up to thirty three million gods, each with their own quirks (from charsis to liars), it is a minor detail to co-opt a few more: Allah Christ, all are welcome, this way please. The failure of the Muslim to reciprocate, to stop being a spoilt, stubborn, monotheist can sometimes, understandably, be frustrating.

And so, when they do find that one soul who will have their prashad, they are immediately embraced, held up as moderates, and fireworks (Lakshmi brand, what else) set off to declare the continued good health of secular traditions.

As a nation in panic, as a nation that is increasingly finding its imagination of what India constitutes severally threatened, there is a constant need for proof of this co-mingling, this idea of religio-cultural osmosis that strings together vastly disparate peoples from “Kashmir to Kanyakumari” into an “Akhand Bharat”.

Rushdie is of course the poster boy of this - he is the right kind of muslim. He is adequately westernized (therefore accessible), exhibits nearly none of the lunacy that the word muslim brings to mind these days, and is brilliant to boot. As Ananya Kabir writes in her book The Territory of Desire, his is the “voice of the modern Indian Muslim, the liberal nationalist, celebrated at home and abroad, fluent in secular rituals and polytheistic traditions, resident in a country of influence but vocal about his ties to India”. The liberals and the secularists couldn’t possibly get a better case-in-point if they tried.

And so imagine the dismay when the NSM-M begins to quibble, begins to show discomfort, begins to use ifs and buts, looking to qualify his support.

“B...but, I support azaadi in Kashmir" blubbers the NMW-L, pleading "yaar, I am not offended even when Geelani speaks. So why won’t you stand up for freedom of speech, for Rushdie’s right to say whatever he wants?!”

The NSM-M, feeling cloistered by arguments, leaps wildly. “What if I called Sita a prostitute, what if I called Krishna a lecher--”

“yes, yes, that is your right” says the NMW-L excitedly, finally on home ground. “You can say anything, anything - I don’t mind at all. I may not agree but I don’t mind at all” He wants to add that frankly, i couldn't care less but already the NSM-M has broken down, and is now wailing that no, he can’t, he can’t - he is offended. He wants to gouge Rushdie’s eyes out, wants to throw him to dogs for insulting the Prophet (peace be upon him). It’s too deep seated, it hurts and it is not ok.

And he walks away.

The NMW-L walks away too, shaking his head, muttering under his breath “they don’t deserve only. Fucking mullahs”