(4) Jaipur
The journey from Delhi to Jaipur was a monument in itself. The road was remarkably straight for much of the distance between the two cities, some of it actually a divided highway and mostly well paved. There was a sense in leaving Delhi of a releasing of lateral pressure into wide open space. None of the sparse traffic present was vying for the space that you occupied. The open road and countryside were like a clearing in a tireless shoving din. It was great to not be in a hotel room, a plane, a rickshaw taxi or an office, even though I was in a tiny sedan called an Ambassador, made in India, for Indian sized people. It is based on a sixties model of an English car called Morris, a tractor simple mainstay of the Indian taxicab armada. I spread across the whole back seat in order to sit comfortably, and watched the countryside open up before us. Singh would periodically point out a distant fort or tower, but otherwise was not talkative or very responsive. It took a while to figure out that his hearing was probably impeded by his turban, making him seem remote and his responses to my questions indirect and sporadic. He was splendidly insulated from the world, with his beard and turban and always wearing a buttoned up shirt and an open jacket, and part of him always seemed elsewhere, wearing away like erosion at some intractable question or problem.
Being on the road was cinematic, a vastness partaken from a station of relative comfort. The country got more uneven, hilly and rocky, as we got further from Delhi. There were villages appearing more often and less signs of large scale agriculture, a few small towns to pass through, more livestock, and then, three hours out of Delhi, a large two wheeled cart carrying an enormous clothbound bundle of something, pulled by a camel. Seeing a camel outside of a zoo was disorienting enough, but seeing a camel actually doing something was even more astounding. With the exception of a few shows on the Discovery Channel I had never seen a camel actually working. This creature was always stupefied with boredom in a zoo or decked out like the Mardi Gras is some circus. It was absolutely surreal. a massive primal non-sequitur ambling down the highway, with a driver sitting on his heels on the cart, idly brushing at the camel with a long thin stick. I saw a camel train of sorts, camel carts tied in a line to the back of a lead camel cart, all in control of a single driver. Seeing more of them, and seeing them in groups reminded me how ice age these wonderful animals are. Their moving about in the world forces the western circus/zoo-goer to reorder the scale of everything. Camels are huge. They have a riveting autonomy to them, even in a harness doing a much smaller guys work. Their elongated anatomy is at the very edge of credibility. They evoke a far off time at the dawn of human consciousness, and here was this creature whose life spans two global epochs, pulling carts of all kinds of merchandise in and out of Rhajahstan.
The highway narrowed to two lanes, undivided, and became more like the thoroughfares I had seen in Aurangabad. The more prosperous dwellings had a small walled compound, full of livestock and domesticity. There were more improvised kiosks with their resolute vendors and their bewildering offerings. It was getting more rural, and there were more and more camel carts, reinforcing the sense that road to Jaipur was a road back in time. The road began to wind and climb and the buildings crowded closer to it, traffic became more dense, and there were still plenty of camel carts. The higher we climbed the more the buildings were forced to conform to the rocky landscape, giving them the appearance of clinging to their surroundings like barnacles. We rounded a curve and came face to back side with an ELEPHANT carrying a bunch of logs. Singh observed "there is an elephant". The idea that an elephant needed and introduction at this range was hilarious to me, dramatizing the heightening discrepancy between words and the experiences that surrounded me.
Jaipur is a much bigger town than I expected. It is a sprawling place that has been a cultural center for 500 years. We stopped at the edge of town for lunch and I had one of the best meals I had in India, all Rhajastani dishes, rich with butter and musky earthy spices. The restaurant was a place with outdoor dining and a destination for tour busses. I was astounded to see other diners eating sandwiches and Chinese food. A man in a native costume played a small bowed stringed instrument, at times whirling himself as he played to give the sound a pleasant tremolo. After lunch we headed to the hotel. This meant traversing an old part of Jaipur, a long boulevard lined with two story buildings that were all painted pink beneath a coating of variegated grime. As we turned a corner onto this boulevard, past a massive tiled public urinal, it was as if Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel had both disgorged their contents along with a smirking challenge to make sense of this if you can. The first thing I saw was a monkey, sitting on the busy street corner taking in the action around him with an expression of grave skepticism. He seemed troubled by what he saw. His appearance of parochial concern was at once hilarious and alarming. As we went up the street I realized that along with the previously mentioned traffic typical of Indian town life, there were families of wild pigs browsing in the debris, wild dogs, wild donkeys, quite a few monkeys, camel carts, ox carts, the usual meandering sacred cows, and an occasional elephant. The boulevard was the conduit of a cross-species cooperative the diversity of which I had never considered, let alone seen. There was a feeling of pristine equilibrium in the way that all of these disparate agendas of exchange and livelihood seemed interconnected. A tourist I talked to later confirmed the impression of mutuality from this mix of activities and participants, but added that at night these various animal groups fight for territory, adding the sounds of violent death to the winter night. There were too many competing focal points. My comprehension of what was in front of me was in danger of some kind of gridlock or screen freeze from trying to digest this saturation. The pink from the buildings reflected everywhere, even on the ever-present Indian winter haze, giving the world a magical warmth. I felt my attention being divided in ways I had never experienced by these simultaneous contradictions. Extraordinary moments become etched in your consciousness when you confront something which compels you reach in a way that you didn't know existed, and you marvel that the reach was in you and have to redefine yourself because of it. Here was an overload of those moments, and like any good thing, a surfeit produces stupor rather than coherence . I had to stop looking. It was just too much. I checked into the hotel and arranged to meet Singh two hours later after a much needed nap. We were only going to be in Jaipur overnight, a decision I now regret, and I wanted to see Maharajah Jai Singhs astrological observatory that afternoon.
We went back through the pink part of town to two enormous adjoining compounds, one housing the palace of the Rajah, and the other containing his observatory. The observatory was built over a several decades at the beginning of the 18th century, and the structures and mechanisms there are configured toward one goal, the accurate reading of sidereal time and location to produce the most accurate astrological charts possible. The recurring form within this group of masonry structures was a like a stairway to nowhere inclined at 27 degrees ( the latitude of Jaipur) which bisected a semicircle of precisely finished marble whose axis coincided with the line of the stairway, with finely incised regular increments along its edge. The largest of these was about four stories high and had been tested by modern instruments that determined that it was accurate to within two seconds, making it the worlds largest and most accurate sundial. Some structures that mimicked this monumental timepiece at a much smaller scale were directed toward individual constellations in the zodiac, and there were a few that were preparatory studies for the main sundial. There was also two perfectly formed marble hemispheres, concaved into the ground with their equators even with the ground plane, with the north star and a map of the heavens beautifully incised and subdivided on the surface of the marble concavity. These were models for two larger sunken structures that were twice as big, about 7 meters in diameter both aligned similarly and each diagramming the same map of the heavens, but each had openings in its surface which allowed an astrologer to "enter" the celestial realm by descending an adjacent stairway to take accurate readings of the shadow of its center, cast by a small circle suspended centrally overhead by a taut cable. The area missing in one of the sunken hemispherical maps which allowed access for reading was present in its counterpart, the sum of the two allowed a complete reading of the earth in relation to the heavens at any moment of the day. All of these solid state metering devices allowed through the calculation of physical phenomena to ascertain the precise state of celestial locations in relation to the earth at any time of the day or night! This was much like Elephanta, where monument as the fulcrum between the earthly and the heavenly realm became a truth I was physically immersed in, rather than an allegation in a text or discussion. The monuments in Jaipur were the summation of millennia of observation and painstaking notation with elementary technologies and no only rudimentary optics, all in the name of calibrating a human souls alignment with the eternal scheme of things at the moment of its entry into that scheme .
I had arrived at the observatory around four o'clock, and discovered after a few shots that the battery for the light meter in my camera had expired. I felt drained and depressed. I left the observatory compound and went to the adjacent museum compound where there was a store that sold film, postcards and trinkets, but no batteries that would fit my camera. The proprietor insisted that his underling take a motorbike to another store to find my battery, a stubby 6 volt cylinder that I had no recollection of ever seeing or replacing. I was too weak and exhausted to resist, and the shop owner treated me to a glass of tea and some chitchat under a tree outside his shop. Twenty minutes later the assistant returned with two 3 volt batteries, and miraculously they stacked one on top the other in the battery holder and the light meter worked fine. I tipped the young man a few dollars, paid the shop owner for the batteries and bought a couple of geegaws as a genuinely felt gesture of gratitude. He commented that the improvising of the battery replacement was second nature to Indians, where lack of access let alone choice were constant facts of daily life. I took a few slides back at the observatory in the failing winter light, had a very average dinner, arranged with Singh to return the next morning before departing for Agra, and collapsed shivering and spent in my hotel. The next morning I returned to the observatory at opening time, 9 am, and took a hundred or so pictures over two or so hours of the various celestial devices which turned out to be much more legible than the few shots I had taken the previous afternoon. Singh and I departed for Agra and I was glad for some travel time in which to do nothing but cough and blow my nose.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.
Being on the road was cinematic, a vastness partaken from a station of relative comfort. The country got more uneven, hilly and rocky, as we got further from Delhi. There were villages appearing more often and less signs of large scale agriculture, a few small towns to pass through, more livestock, and then, three hours out of Delhi, a large two wheeled cart carrying an enormous clothbound bundle of something, pulled by a camel. Seeing a camel outside of a zoo was disorienting enough, but seeing a camel actually doing something was even more astounding. With the exception of a few shows on the Discovery Channel I had never seen a camel actually working. This creature was always stupefied with boredom in a zoo or decked out like the Mardi Gras is some circus. It was absolutely surreal. a massive primal non-sequitur ambling down the highway, with a driver sitting on his heels on the cart, idly brushing at the camel with a long thin stick. I saw a camel train of sorts, camel carts tied in a line to the back of a lead camel cart, all in control of a single driver. Seeing more of them, and seeing them in groups reminded me how ice age these wonderful animals are. Their moving about in the world forces the western circus/zoo-goer to reorder the scale of everything. Camels are huge. They have a riveting autonomy to them, even in a harness doing a much smaller guys work. Their elongated anatomy is at the very edge of credibility. They evoke a far off time at the dawn of human consciousness, and here was this creature whose life spans two global epochs, pulling carts of all kinds of merchandise in and out of Rhajahstan.
The highway narrowed to two lanes, undivided, and became more like the thoroughfares I had seen in Aurangabad. The more prosperous dwellings had a small walled compound, full of livestock and domesticity. There were more improvised kiosks with their resolute vendors and their bewildering offerings. It was getting more rural, and there were more and more camel carts, reinforcing the sense that road to Jaipur was a road back in time. The road began to wind and climb and the buildings crowded closer to it, traffic became more dense, and there were still plenty of camel carts. The higher we climbed the more the buildings were forced to conform to the rocky landscape, giving them the appearance of clinging to their surroundings like barnacles. We rounded a curve and came face to back side with an ELEPHANT carrying a bunch of logs. Singh observed "there is an elephant". The idea that an elephant needed and introduction at this range was hilarious to me, dramatizing the heightening discrepancy between words and the experiences that surrounded me.
Jaipur is a much bigger town than I expected. It is a sprawling place that has been a cultural center for 500 years. We stopped at the edge of town for lunch and I had one of the best meals I had in India, all Rhajastani dishes, rich with butter and musky earthy spices. The restaurant was a place with outdoor dining and a destination for tour busses. I was astounded to see other diners eating sandwiches and Chinese food. A man in a native costume played a small bowed stringed instrument, at times whirling himself as he played to give the sound a pleasant tremolo. After lunch we headed to the hotel. This meant traversing an old part of Jaipur, a long boulevard lined with two story buildings that were all painted pink beneath a coating of variegated grime. As we turned a corner onto this boulevard, past a massive tiled public urinal, it was as if Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel had both disgorged their contents along with a smirking challenge to make sense of this if you can. The first thing I saw was a monkey, sitting on the busy street corner taking in the action around him with an expression of grave skepticism. He seemed troubled by what he saw. His appearance of parochial concern was at once hilarious and alarming. As we went up the street I realized that along with the previously mentioned traffic typical of Indian town life, there were families of wild pigs browsing in the debris, wild dogs, wild donkeys, quite a few monkeys, camel carts, ox carts, the usual meandering sacred cows, and an occasional elephant. The boulevard was the conduit of a cross-species cooperative the diversity of which I had never considered, let alone seen. There was a feeling of pristine equilibrium in the way that all of these disparate agendas of exchange and livelihood seemed interconnected. A tourist I talked to later confirmed the impression of mutuality from this mix of activities and participants, but added that at night these various animal groups fight for territory, adding the sounds of violent death to the winter night. There were too many competing focal points. My comprehension of what was in front of me was in danger of some kind of gridlock or screen freeze from trying to digest this saturation. The pink from the buildings reflected everywhere, even on the ever-present Indian winter haze, giving the world a magical warmth. I felt my attention being divided in ways I had never experienced by these simultaneous contradictions. Extraordinary moments become etched in your consciousness when you confront something which compels you reach in a way that you didn't know existed, and you marvel that the reach was in you and have to redefine yourself because of it. Here was an overload of those moments, and like any good thing, a surfeit produces stupor rather than coherence . I had to stop looking. It was just too much. I checked into the hotel and arranged to meet Singh two hours later after a much needed nap. We were only going to be in Jaipur overnight, a decision I now regret, and I wanted to see Maharajah Jai Singhs astrological observatory that afternoon.
We went back through the pink part of town to two enormous adjoining compounds, one housing the palace of the Rajah, and the other containing his observatory. The observatory was built over a several decades at the beginning of the 18th century, and the structures and mechanisms there are configured toward one goal, the accurate reading of sidereal time and location to produce the most accurate astrological charts possible. The recurring form within this group of masonry structures was a like a stairway to nowhere inclined at 27 degrees ( the latitude of Jaipur) which bisected a semicircle of precisely finished marble whose axis coincided with the line of the stairway, with finely incised regular increments along its edge. The largest of these was about four stories high and had been tested by modern instruments that determined that it was accurate to within two seconds, making it the worlds largest and most accurate sundial. Some structures that mimicked this monumental timepiece at a much smaller scale were directed toward individual constellations in the zodiac, and there were a few that were preparatory studies for the main sundial. There was also two perfectly formed marble hemispheres, concaved into the ground with their equators even with the ground plane, with the north star and a map of the heavens beautifully incised and subdivided on the surface of the marble concavity. These were models for two larger sunken structures that were twice as big, about 7 meters in diameter both aligned similarly and each diagramming the same map of the heavens, but each had openings in its surface which allowed an astrologer to "enter" the celestial realm by descending an adjacent stairway to take accurate readings of the shadow of its center, cast by a small circle suspended centrally overhead by a taut cable. The area missing in one of the sunken hemispherical maps which allowed access for reading was present in its counterpart, the sum of the two allowed a complete reading of the earth in relation to the heavens at any moment of the day. All of these solid state metering devices allowed through the calculation of physical phenomena to ascertain the precise state of celestial locations in relation to the earth at any time of the day or night! This was much like Elephanta, where monument as the fulcrum between the earthly and the heavenly realm became a truth I was physically immersed in, rather than an allegation in a text or discussion. The monuments in Jaipur were the summation of millennia of observation and painstaking notation with elementary technologies and no only rudimentary optics, all in the name of calibrating a human souls alignment with the eternal scheme of things at the moment of its entry into that scheme .
I had arrived at the observatory around four o'clock, and discovered after a few shots that the battery for the light meter in my camera had expired. I felt drained and depressed. I left the observatory compound and went to the adjacent museum compound where there was a store that sold film, postcards and trinkets, but no batteries that would fit my camera. The proprietor insisted that his underling take a motorbike to another store to find my battery, a stubby 6 volt cylinder that I had no recollection of ever seeing or replacing. I was too weak and exhausted to resist, and the shop owner treated me to a glass of tea and some chitchat under a tree outside his shop. Twenty minutes later the assistant returned with two 3 volt batteries, and miraculously they stacked one on top the other in the battery holder and the light meter worked fine. I tipped the young man a few dollars, paid the shop owner for the batteries and bought a couple of geegaws as a genuinely felt gesture of gratitude. He commented that the improvising of the battery replacement was second nature to Indians, where lack of access let alone choice were constant facts of daily life. I took a few slides back at the observatory in the failing winter light, had a very average dinner, arranged with Singh to return the next morning before departing for Agra, and collapsed shivering and spent in my hotel. The next morning I returned to the observatory at opening time, 9 am, and took a hundred or so pictures over two or so hours of the various celestial devices which turned out to be much more legible than the few shots I had taken the previous afternoon. Singh and I departed for Agra and I was glad for some travel time in which to do nothing but cough and blow my nose.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.