(2) Aurangabad
Aurangabad, a one hour flight from Bombay, is the closest town to two world class monuments, the rock cut Buddhist caves at Adjanta, and the rock cut Hindu and Jain caves at Ellora. I arrived in Aurangabad after my inaugural experience with Indian air travel security. This consists of x-raying luggage, x-raying hand baggage, a metal detector scan, a physical frisking, and finally identifying ones checked luggage before it is put in the hold of the aircraft. All of this occurs in an air of solemn officiousness, under the direction of people who take their jobs very seriously. My variant on this ritual presented itself not unexpectedly when the metal detector that is passed over your whole body registered the metal in the ankle joint in my artificial leg. The beeping necessitated a thorough search to expose this metallic menace. First there was the encountering of the leg itself, suspiciously hard and unyielding. Time to lift the pant-leg and see hard pink fiberglass where there should be flesh, a sure sign of potential subterfuge. Next would be a conference with other security personnel, huddled, whispered, away from the guy with his pant leg pulled up over his knee, and finally the request to remove the suspect extremity. Once the reality of me actually removing an extremity was initiated everyone all got the willies at once and urged me to put it back on as quickly as possible. I think these folks were so bored that any variant got the full security treatment, and sometimes that also gets you a case of the willies.
I arrived at Aurangabad around 6 in the evening, got a cab from the "airport" to my hotel, the Aurangabad Ashok, a reputable upscale chain according to the travel agent in Bombay. I settled down in my room and realized quite suddenly that I was sick, seriously sick with a respiratory flu. I had come armed to the teeth in anticipation of digestive problems but was unprepared for the flu, and this was a nasty sinus/throat/chest combo of big-time misery. I spent that evening shaking with fever and cooling my head with bottles of cold mineral water. I found I had no hearing when I turned on the TV and shortly thereafter found I had no voice when I tried to order dinner from room service. I spent the next day being smothered by respiratory congestion, sweating, and cursing the elfin Indian gentleman who coughed and hacked for 14 hours in the seat behind me on the San Francisco/Hong Kong leg of my recent travels. The "central air conditioning" was only capable of an impotent wheeze, and the ceiling fan only had one speed, tornado. It was the dead of winter for the natives but for me it was hot, dry and dusty enough to make a Bedouin homesick.
The following day I ventured out on foot with vague directions to a pharmacy. I encountered the basic matrix for Indian transportation and commerce: an unevenly paved road of fluctuating width with slower traffic, meaning bicycles, ox carts, pedal rickshaws and motorized rickshaws milling on the margins of the pavement and larger faster vehicles, trucks, busses, autos and an odd SUV using a single lane in the middle for transit in BOTH directions. This translates into a never-ending series of chicken runs, tests of nerve where one or the other of the approaching vehicles must yield and merge with the slower traffic at the last possible second. There is peripheral jockeying for advantage in the slower flow as well, and people entering and exiting this unmetered flow with alarming nonchalance. Adjoining this traffic flow on both sides of the pavement is an unpaved margin that is usually as wide on each side of the pavement as the pavement itself. This margin is filled with parked vehicles of all sorts, vendors with pushcarts, browsing cattle, piles of debris, people getting haircuts on wooden boxes and impromptu repairs and maintenance of all sorts.
Beyond the unpaved zone were actual buildings, usually adjoining one another, some newer than others, all decrepit, with bright colors and reflective tinsel peeking through a patina of auto exhaust, grease, dust, betel nut juice, urine and the assorted byproducts of the endless recycling of materials until they disintegrate. A favorite building configuration is a long one story structure, six or eight times as long as it is deep, long side facing the street, subdivided so it produces a series of adjoining cubicles which are all shuttered by metal roll-up doors. From these windowless vaults all manner of merchandise and service is arrayed: bolts of cloth, medicines, fruit, car parts, clothing, rewound electric motors, recapped tires, strings of packets containing hand lotion, detergents, shampoo and cleaners, candy, snacks, clothing repair, shoe repair, an encyclopedia of commerce deployed in a long strip of specialty emporiums, some the size of phone booths.
The image it conjures is that of a coral reef- a brightly colored formation housing an unpredictable and asymmetrical collections of highly specialized denizens, all with sustenance on their minds. Add to this an ever-shifting number of smells: mold, dust, gasoline, dung, spices, cooking food, then leaven the whole business with a din of competing boom boxes, all the honking vehicles and the occasional mobile diatribe from someone cruising in a motorized rickshaw with a loud speaker and you have a pretty typical social/economic/transit experience of everyday Indian life. It may be thirty meters wide and kilometers in length or barely wide enough for two cars to pass and only two blocks long.
Walking along this thoroughfare in Aurangabad in search of cough syrup and aspirin did nothing for my respiratory condition. I started passing a series of roadside businesses that were all selling construction materials, definitely not cough syrup territory. As I decided to reverse directions a young man asked me what country I was from and I said "USA". He said "I have a very important question to ask you, you are from the USA, you would know". I thought he was summoning up the nerve to ask me about opportunities for wild monkey-sex with American tourist women, but instead he asked "are the World Wrestling Federation matches REAL?" The way he asked the question indicated that he had a lot at stake in this answer, so I said "yes". He was delighted. He accompanied me in the right direction to the pharmacy, where I bought my balms and then reeled back to the hotel, still coughing and feverish.
The next day I needed cash, so I went to a bank which was listed in a guidebook as a place where you could get cash advanced on your credit card. I found the bank to be an inhospitable place, a location that seemed to have been reclaimed from a very large toilet in a very dirty barracks, a very long time ago. There were bare florescent lights, dirty windows, a band of dirt around the wall right at floor level where halfhearted mopping had occurred at some time in the past, and above all there was the suffocating inertia of an entrenched bureaucracy that had something you wanted. I was directed to the second floor for my transaction, to an operation called BobCard. The name and circumstances shrieked larceny, but I had no choice in the matter. There was a room with a desk and some benches with people waiting, all clutching documents. Some of them appeared to have been there for a long time. I presented my card to the guy behind the desk and first he wrote my card number in a ledger, along with the numbers of many other folks from all over the world. Then he read my credit card number to someone on the phone, in front of this room full of people. He then said in a booming voice "I repeat...." and rattled off my credit card number at a volume that must have carried for blocks. I was a quivering mass of compliant dismay, there was nothing to be done, no conceivable entry to indicate to him how categorically appalling the whole scene was. He gave me a piece of paper which I was able to convert into 900 Rupees, minus ten percent, and I left, slack jawed at what I had experienced. Afterward I ventured out briefly to visit the Aurangabad caves, a very short and exhausting trip, the caves are Jain in origin, one really beautiful, the others seemed unfinished, both overshadowed in reputation by the more distant caves at Ellora.
The following day I hired a guy with a motorized rickshaw to take me to Ellora, another of my most anticipated destinations. I felt terrible but also felt that I had to go on or the whole trip would get away from me. It is thirty kilometers from Aurangabad to Ellora, a bone crunching thirty kilometers when you are unable to stop coughing and the world is full of dust. I only saw two of the caves with any thoroughness, number 15, the Kalisha, the really famous one, which is the only monument at Ellora that isn't a cave but a complete traditional temple complex carved out of one enormous piece of stone. I also saw cave number 32, from a later date, very well preserved, with a Jain origin. Both were miraculous in their own very different ways, but both had been vacated in a way that Elephanta had not. At Elephanta something was still "going on" besides the ebb and flow of tourists. Ellora had in common with another great monument, Notre Dame of Paris, the sense that it primary use was now in a way that was never intended, and that there were no remnants of its previous life in its present state, even though there are still devotional activities in Notre Dame. I don't know whether accessibility is part of this stripping away of spiritual presence, but for me the people who made Elephanta were still there and at Ellora (and Notre Dame) the people that made them were gone.
The Kalisha is well preserved and intact in ways that other monuments are not. There is ample evidence that after carving a shrine, a courtyard surrounding that shrine, two huge elephants, two stories of surrounding arcades and chambers that look into and bound the courtyard and shrine, multiple relief sculpture and an imposing gate, all out of very hard volcanic basalt, the artists of Ellora coated the whole elaborate business with a layer of plaster two centimeters thick, carved details into that, and then painted everything! The caves were a religious and educational center, complete with dormitories for students, classrooms, residences for monks, all cut out of one piece of continuous solid rock. The whole enterprise took 150 years. Artisans lived their whole lives there, generations of folks toiled in the name of their beliefs toward the completion of this monument, and they were gone.
A poetic aspect of the process of creating such a place, and it must be present in all rock-cut cave architecture, is that the cave was carved from the top down, so that the material being removed was also the scaffolding for the carving above it. I saw several instances of starts for further internal spaces which were small cubic openings high up on the rock face, where artisans would carve a space into the rock, going inward and then upward, remove material laterally to the perimeter of the desired space, and then start downward to the "floor". A great inversion of the traditional notion of the monument, an entity arrived at from the bottom upward by the accumulation and strategic placement of material. In the case of the cave monument the Artisan/architect was gnawing from within to realize a form defined totally by what had been removed, a void that was as emblematic of their beliefs as the salience of the externalized and constructed monument.
I was sick of Aurangabad, I had been there almost a week, and I was still sick with the flu. I confronted the monumental folly of not booking travel plans in advance when I tried to book a flight to my next stop, Jaipur, where I found that I had to return to Bombay to get to Jaipur. I noticed that Delhi seemed to be more of a hub for air travel, especially for destinations in the north, so I booked a flight to Delhi via Bombay, had my hotel folks reserve a room for me at a branch of their hotel in Delhi, and prepared to get out of town.
On the day of my departure my now familiar guide, Sheikh Nassir, took me to see a bazaar, a farmers market that occurred every Thursday outside of town. It was my first look at Indian rural life. There were some houses along one side of the site of the bazaar, and they exhibited qualities that I had seen elsewhere, a sense of chaos and indifference, a general disorderliness. There were clotheslines full of colorful garments, a bed and its bedding out in the yard, extension cords draped about, dogs, bicycles, white Brahman cattle, carts with wooden and metal wheels, people, goats, all commingling without apparent boundary. Another way of seeing that I had brought with me was being redefined.
The bazaar was colorful and astounding. I realized that the street commerce and traffic organization in the town represented the way that this older social and economic matrix, the bazaar, had adapted to the addition of modern roads and mobility. This bazaar was where people came to buy animals for food, alive and butchered, animals for other domestic use, spices, produce of all kinds and a few commodities I couldn't recognize. The colors were riotous and viscera was everywhere. One vendor seemed to feel that turning her cleaned plucked chickens inside out would make them more desirable. A man hacked fish into pieces, the spattered byproducts delighted the flies, and there was no refrigeration in evidence anywhere. Goats were butchered, oxen were purchased to pull a plow or wagon, chilies and peppers of all colors were weighed and bargained over, there were garlands of flowers, mounds of dried organic stuff all neatly sorted, conical piles of vermilion and ochre, or maybe it was paprika and turmeric, polyester pants, motor oil, charcoal, fruit, shoes, all on display under makeshift canopies billowing in the breeze. Everyone seemed friendly and curious and I was the only Caucasian in sight.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.
I arrived at Aurangabad around 6 in the evening, got a cab from the "airport" to my hotel, the Aurangabad Ashok, a reputable upscale chain according to the travel agent in Bombay. I settled down in my room and realized quite suddenly that I was sick, seriously sick with a respiratory flu. I had come armed to the teeth in anticipation of digestive problems but was unprepared for the flu, and this was a nasty sinus/throat/chest combo of big-time misery. I spent that evening shaking with fever and cooling my head with bottles of cold mineral water. I found I had no hearing when I turned on the TV and shortly thereafter found I had no voice when I tried to order dinner from room service. I spent the next day being smothered by respiratory congestion, sweating, and cursing the elfin Indian gentleman who coughed and hacked for 14 hours in the seat behind me on the San Francisco/Hong Kong leg of my recent travels. The "central air conditioning" was only capable of an impotent wheeze, and the ceiling fan only had one speed, tornado. It was the dead of winter for the natives but for me it was hot, dry and dusty enough to make a Bedouin homesick.
The following day I ventured out on foot with vague directions to a pharmacy. I encountered the basic matrix for Indian transportation and commerce: an unevenly paved road of fluctuating width with slower traffic, meaning bicycles, ox carts, pedal rickshaws and motorized rickshaws milling on the margins of the pavement and larger faster vehicles, trucks, busses, autos and an odd SUV using a single lane in the middle for transit in BOTH directions. This translates into a never-ending series of chicken runs, tests of nerve where one or the other of the approaching vehicles must yield and merge with the slower traffic at the last possible second. There is peripheral jockeying for advantage in the slower flow as well, and people entering and exiting this unmetered flow with alarming nonchalance. Adjoining this traffic flow on both sides of the pavement is an unpaved margin that is usually as wide on each side of the pavement as the pavement itself. This margin is filled with parked vehicles of all sorts, vendors with pushcarts, browsing cattle, piles of debris, people getting haircuts on wooden boxes and impromptu repairs and maintenance of all sorts.
Beyond the unpaved zone were actual buildings, usually adjoining one another, some newer than others, all decrepit, with bright colors and reflective tinsel peeking through a patina of auto exhaust, grease, dust, betel nut juice, urine and the assorted byproducts of the endless recycling of materials until they disintegrate. A favorite building configuration is a long one story structure, six or eight times as long as it is deep, long side facing the street, subdivided so it produces a series of adjoining cubicles which are all shuttered by metal roll-up doors. From these windowless vaults all manner of merchandise and service is arrayed: bolts of cloth, medicines, fruit, car parts, clothing, rewound electric motors, recapped tires, strings of packets containing hand lotion, detergents, shampoo and cleaners, candy, snacks, clothing repair, shoe repair, an encyclopedia of commerce deployed in a long strip of specialty emporiums, some the size of phone booths.
The image it conjures is that of a coral reef- a brightly colored formation housing an unpredictable and asymmetrical collections of highly specialized denizens, all with sustenance on their minds. Add to this an ever-shifting number of smells: mold, dust, gasoline, dung, spices, cooking food, then leaven the whole business with a din of competing boom boxes, all the honking vehicles and the occasional mobile diatribe from someone cruising in a motorized rickshaw with a loud speaker and you have a pretty typical social/economic/transit experience of everyday Indian life. It may be thirty meters wide and kilometers in length or barely wide enough for two cars to pass and only two blocks long.
Walking along this thoroughfare in Aurangabad in search of cough syrup and aspirin did nothing for my respiratory condition. I started passing a series of roadside businesses that were all selling construction materials, definitely not cough syrup territory. As I decided to reverse directions a young man asked me what country I was from and I said "USA". He said "I have a very important question to ask you, you are from the USA, you would know". I thought he was summoning up the nerve to ask me about opportunities for wild monkey-sex with American tourist women, but instead he asked "are the World Wrestling Federation matches REAL?" The way he asked the question indicated that he had a lot at stake in this answer, so I said "yes". He was delighted. He accompanied me in the right direction to the pharmacy, where I bought my balms and then reeled back to the hotel, still coughing and feverish.
The next day I needed cash, so I went to a bank which was listed in a guidebook as a place where you could get cash advanced on your credit card. I found the bank to be an inhospitable place, a location that seemed to have been reclaimed from a very large toilet in a very dirty barracks, a very long time ago. There were bare florescent lights, dirty windows, a band of dirt around the wall right at floor level where halfhearted mopping had occurred at some time in the past, and above all there was the suffocating inertia of an entrenched bureaucracy that had something you wanted. I was directed to the second floor for my transaction, to an operation called BobCard. The name and circumstances shrieked larceny, but I had no choice in the matter. There was a room with a desk and some benches with people waiting, all clutching documents. Some of them appeared to have been there for a long time. I presented my card to the guy behind the desk and first he wrote my card number in a ledger, along with the numbers of many other folks from all over the world. Then he read my credit card number to someone on the phone, in front of this room full of people. He then said in a booming voice "I repeat...." and rattled off my credit card number at a volume that must have carried for blocks. I was a quivering mass of compliant dismay, there was nothing to be done, no conceivable entry to indicate to him how categorically appalling the whole scene was. He gave me a piece of paper which I was able to convert into 900 Rupees, minus ten percent, and I left, slack jawed at what I had experienced. Afterward I ventured out briefly to visit the Aurangabad caves, a very short and exhausting trip, the caves are Jain in origin, one really beautiful, the others seemed unfinished, both overshadowed in reputation by the more distant caves at Ellora.
The following day I hired a guy with a motorized rickshaw to take me to Ellora, another of my most anticipated destinations. I felt terrible but also felt that I had to go on or the whole trip would get away from me. It is thirty kilometers from Aurangabad to Ellora, a bone crunching thirty kilometers when you are unable to stop coughing and the world is full of dust. I only saw two of the caves with any thoroughness, number 15, the Kalisha, the really famous one, which is the only monument at Ellora that isn't a cave but a complete traditional temple complex carved out of one enormous piece of stone. I also saw cave number 32, from a later date, very well preserved, with a Jain origin. Both were miraculous in their own very different ways, but both had been vacated in a way that Elephanta had not. At Elephanta something was still "going on" besides the ebb and flow of tourists. Ellora had in common with another great monument, Notre Dame of Paris, the sense that it primary use was now in a way that was never intended, and that there were no remnants of its previous life in its present state, even though there are still devotional activities in Notre Dame. I don't know whether accessibility is part of this stripping away of spiritual presence, but for me the people who made Elephanta were still there and at Ellora (and Notre Dame) the people that made them were gone.
The Kalisha is well preserved and intact in ways that other monuments are not. There is ample evidence that after carving a shrine, a courtyard surrounding that shrine, two huge elephants, two stories of surrounding arcades and chambers that look into and bound the courtyard and shrine, multiple relief sculpture and an imposing gate, all out of very hard volcanic basalt, the artists of Ellora coated the whole elaborate business with a layer of plaster two centimeters thick, carved details into that, and then painted everything! The caves were a religious and educational center, complete with dormitories for students, classrooms, residences for monks, all cut out of one piece of continuous solid rock. The whole enterprise took 150 years. Artisans lived their whole lives there, generations of folks toiled in the name of their beliefs toward the completion of this monument, and they were gone.
A poetic aspect of the process of creating such a place, and it must be present in all rock-cut cave architecture, is that the cave was carved from the top down, so that the material being removed was also the scaffolding for the carving above it. I saw several instances of starts for further internal spaces which were small cubic openings high up on the rock face, where artisans would carve a space into the rock, going inward and then upward, remove material laterally to the perimeter of the desired space, and then start downward to the "floor". A great inversion of the traditional notion of the monument, an entity arrived at from the bottom upward by the accumulation and strategic placement of material. In the case of the cave monument the Artisan/architect was gnawing from within to realize a form defined totally by what had been removed, a void that was as emblematic of their beliefs as the salience of the externalized and constructed monument.
I was sick of Aurangabad, I had been there almost a week, and I was still sick with the flu. I confronted the monumental folly of not booking travel plans in advance when I tried to book a flight to my next stop, Jaipur, where I found that I had to return to Bombay to get to Jaipur. I noticed that Delhi seemed to be more of a hub for air travel, especially for destinations in the north, so I booked a flight to Delhi via Bombay, had my hotel folks reserve a room for me at a branch of their hotel in Delhi, and prepared to get out of town.
On the day of my departure my now familiar guide, Sheikh Nassir, took me to see a bazaar, a farmers market that occurred every Thursday outside of town. It was my first look at Indian rural life. There were some houses along one side of the site of the bazaar, and they exhibited qualities that I had seen elsewhere, a sense of chaos and indifference, a general disorderliness. There were clotheslines full of colorful garments, a bed and its bedding out in the yard, extension cords draped about, dogs, bicycles, white Brahman cattle, carts with wooden and metal wheels, people, goats, all commingling without apparent boundary. Another way of seeing that I had brought with me was being redefined.
The bazaar was colorful and astounding. I realized that the street commerce and traffic organization in the town represented the way that this older social and economic matrix, the bazaar, had adapted to the addition of modern roads and mobility. This bazaar was where people came to buy animals for food, alive and butchered, animals for other domestic use, spices, produce of all kinds and a few commodities I couldn't recognize. The colors were riotous and viscera was everywhere. One vendor seemed to feel that turning her cleaned plucked chickens inside out would make them more desirable. A man hacked fish into pieces, the spattered byproducts delighted the flies, and there was no refrigeration in evidence anywhere. Goats were butchered, oxen were purchased to pull a plow or wagon, chilies and peppers of all colors were weighed and bargained over, there were garlands of flowers, mounds of dried organic stuff all neatly sorted, conical piles of vermilion and ochre, or maybe it was paprika and turmeric, polyester pants, motor oil, charcoal, fruit, shoes, all on display under makeshift canopies billowing in the breeze. Everyone seemed friendly and curious and I was the only Caucasian in sight.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.