Drinking Chiyaa

A travel post

Posted on March 17th, 2010 by miranda.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Last week I was in India – mostly in Udaipur city, in the state of Rajasthan, for a conference of Fulbrighters working in South Asia. Like many SouthAsia things, this basically meant India, with a couple of representatives from other countries – the handful of us from Nepal, an awesome group from Sri Lanka, and only the head of the Pakistan program to represent the whole thing.

We flew from Kathmandu to Delhi (the flight is almost exactly the length of the excellent movie version of Fantastic Mr. Fox – thank you Jet Air; Jet also gives a full lunch and free beer on an hour-and-a-half flight), then had a couple hours to kill in Delhi. My previous experience in Delhi had been some two pretty miserable trips through what I remembered as a chaotic airport. Maybe because I didn’t have to deal with the domestic terminal, or because I was traveling with friends who knew the airport better than I do, or maybe because I was coming from the ever-charming Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, it seemed really quite nice this time around.

We moved from there to Dilli Haat, an outdoor crafts market with stalls representing vendors from all around India. The highlight was really the window shopping, but good runners up were some good samosas for an afternoon snack and managing to find bangles that fit my tiny wrists. After that, we headed off to explore the old fort, Purana Qila, the first of many exciting old sites during this trip, but most exciting for its grassy field—not something we get in Kathmandu (photos of Purana Qila & the rest of the trip are up on both flickr & facebook).

From there we headed through the wide, tree-lined streets of central Delhi past the India gate and shocking amounts of green public space to the train station, where we had seats on the express train to Udaipur. Despite the horror stories I’d heard, I found the overnight train (3-tier AC class) quite pleasant and well-managed. It was satisfying to fall asleep leaving Delhi, and wake up the next morning in the desert of Rajasthan.

We were put up in an opulent hotel in Udaipur – participant observation in the wealthy side of the New India, I guess, though we weren’t in the Oberoi or the Taj (in the former Lake Palace. In the middle of a lake.) or some of the even fancier hotels around. Since we’d arrived the day before the start of the conference, we spent the day exploring Udaipur city and heading out to some temple sites a little outside of the city. Included in this: autorickshaw adventures, an Indian version of chiles rellenos, incredible 11th century temple ruins, beautiful views of the aging Aravalli mountain range (barely hills by Nepali standards, but really lovely).

And then the conference began. As I’d expected, the regional Fulbrighters are an incredibly talented bunch, doing work on extremely diverse and fascinating topics. I was one of only three people looking at language-related things; one other is a linguistic anthropology grad student looking at language politics of Santhal, particularly related to orthography, another is a sociolinguist doing a discourse analysis of the Incredible India tourism campaign. There were interesting conversations in hallways and at meals. And then, because this is South Asia, the second morning of the conference, I woke up with unpleasant nasty food poisoning and spent the day in bed. But at least it was a very comfortable bed, and only lasted until the evening, and I got to participate again in the last day of the conference.

I realized over the course of the trip that I’m so used to only hearing Hindi in films and TV that I barely believe it’s a language that real people speak.

After the conference, some of my excellent Nepal colleagues and I moved to a less opulent but still lovely hotel in an old palace on the lake shore in Udaipur, and used that as the base for some more sightseeing (and even shopping. You just can’t get the same quality of fabric in Kathmandu that they had in Udaipur and Delhi, and the bright colors there make Kathmandu colors seem drab and boring), around the city and a long daytrip to some of the other sites in the area: Kumbalgarh, a fort with the second longest continuous wall in the world (for anyone who’s seen the movie Lagaan – they show a couple shots of Kumbalgarh at the beginning. For anyone who hasn’t seen Lagaan – it’s one of my favorite Hindi films, and you should see it. Aamir Khan is attractive, and it makes cricket somewhat understandable.), and a huge beautiful Jain temple.

And then back on the overnight train to Delhi, where our layover was spent playing cards in the food court and security was nowhere near as unpleasant and chaotic as I remembered it from two years ago, and to Kathmandu. It felt good to be back in Kathmandu – with my official visa I could zip through immigration, I know how to get through the airport quickly, and once we got out I could haggle with taxi drivers in Nepali to get a somewhat reasonable price home.

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Anything you want to know about the trip? This is sort of a bare bones account, to get it all written down before I start life in Kathmandu for real again, but ask me questions & I’ll try to answer them.

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