Mad in India

This article first appeared in Meanjin, June 2004

'I slept all afternoon & when I woke I thought it was morning, I didn't know where I was. I had no name for India.' Allen Ginsberg

On 5 and 6 January 2004 I was at the SCG to watch Steve Waugh's last test match. It was against India. Many Indians I heard interviewed, especially those who had had contact with Waugh through his work with lepers in Kolkata, had reached a sporting compromise: they wanted Waugh to get a century but India to win the test. I am Australian but India is a country I have visited several times, want to visit again, read and write about. I wondered whom, when it came down to it, I would barrack for.

India disorientates. Like Ginsberg you find you sleep in the heat of the afternoon, you wake up confused. You try to rest at night but are woken by barking dogs, wedding dancing, loud radios and beating drums. You might find yourself in an airless room. Or you might find yourself in one that is over air-conditioned, for the tourist. You might take some local drugs and have things go wrong, or, as in the case of a friend of mine, drink a Bloody Mary in which the barman has reversed the ratio of tomato juice to Tabasco, and spend the night throwing up.

In the chaos India causes you don't just forget India's name, you forget your own. Or in remembering it feel no connection to it. My name is Sophie but in India I tell people my name is Sophia because that name seems to register more easily. It is something to do with the broadness of my Australian accent. Your name, and the life that goes with it, cease to make sense.

When I first went to India I barely slept for three months. When I returned to Australia I was ill. I could not drink alcohol (a tragedy when doing your first round of twenty-firsts), my heart raced, and I swung from sleeping not at all to sleeping for hours and days at a time. As it turned out, this state of body and mind wasn't just culture shock, it was an anti-malarial drug called Lariam. Nowadays it is acknowledged that the drug can trigger depression and psychosis but when I took it in 1984 no-one mentioned a thing.

In 1999, Roche USA advised against prescribing Lariam for patients with 'active depression or with a history of psychosis or convulsions'. The drug's labels and literature were reworded even more strongly in 2002 to say the following:'Mefloquine [Lariam] may cause psychiatric symptoms in a number of patients, ranging from anxiety, paranoia, and depression to hallucinations and psychotic behavior ... adverse reactions include severe neuropsychiatric disorders (tremor, ataxia, mood changes, panic attacks) and rare cases of suicide (though no relationship to drug administration has been confirmed). '

I have read articles that claim there is evidence to suggest that the killings by soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina in the summer of 2002 may have been related to the use of this drug.

I didn't kill anyone back in 1984; I just lost it with rickshaw drivers. One day I stood in a street in Delhi fighting with a rickshaw wallah who would not put on his meter. I grabbed the pole the meter was perched on and used it as a kind of lever to rock the whole vehicle, violently, from side to side. 'What is this?' I screamed. 'A fucking Christmas tree?' When I recovered from my rage I looked around to see a dozen men pointing at me and laughing. I was yet another ridiculous Westerner.

Thousands, if not millions of travellers have been given the drug, and India is, in many ways, the land where dodgy products are dumped. That's not history, it still happens, and on my last trip to India I met a man called Jhunmun whose first daughter had died when she was only a week old after being fed a milk formula made up with local water. It's the water that kills of course, not the powder, but the products are sold without regard for the fact that people's access to clean water is limited.

So, it seems fair to say that in India twenty years ago I was MAD IN INDIA. Fair to ask then, why I love it so much and why it is that I go back.

As a small child I would spend all my pocket money(all of $2 or so) at a shop called Cargo Hold. It smelt of incense and there were lots of pretty floaty fabrics and objects, such as frog waste paper baskets, made of cane. They always had a small label: 'Made in India'.

MADE IN INDIA. I would repeat the phrase over and over to myself. I would look at photos of the places where these things were made. India. Once the labels said Hong Kong, and then Korea, I lost interest.

As I got older, India became eroticised for me. I fell in love with a high school teacher who went there each year and came back wearing Indian shirts and earrings and silks. He was a hippy. I started to dress in clothes that were MADE IN INDIA (actually, I still do). He would talk of his trips and what he had seen. He would show me maps.

But you notice? A lot of talk about clothes and fabrics and things. The relationship of a consumer to a favoured shopping centre. Capitalism at work. So is that it? I like India because there is some really beautiful stuff there and I want to buy it? Because India is cheap?

People attach themselves to other culture and countries. They become obsessed with Italy or Bali, Peru or Egypt. In The Beat HotelBarry Miles discusses the Beat Poets' (and, by extension, many others') fascination with Paris. 'As non-French speakers, they had no involvement with French culture and the issues of the day, nor were they restricted by rules with which the French lived, simply because they were ignorant of them.' So perhaps one of the reasons I, and many others, love India is because it is not where we come from. In this analysis one is falling in love with an 'absence' of culture, an absence created by one's own ignorance. The place becomes an exotic slide show that serves to make the stories we tell about our travels more colourful.

I use to know all about Lacanian theories of the Other and I wrote my thesis on the subject before that first trip to India. But that kind of theory doesn't explain why people pick a particular country. Why did Helen Darville choose the Ukraine and Jewish people on whom to dump her damaged psyche as Helen Demidenko? Is it because, like her, the Ukraine is a country with boundary problems? A country attempting to create a coherent history out of many separate cultures that do, nonetheless, have some shared history? I have asked myself this many times since the indignity of being the only publisher at Allen & Unwin available on the night of the Miles Franklin award to take her for a drink. She tried to make me dance with her, and circled around me dramatically, arms in the air, peasant blouse and all. She is an extreme case, but she is not the first, nor the last, to take up the causes of a nation she has no business with(something akin to cultural harassment, in which you make unwanted advances to a country that clearly wants nothing to do with you.

Australia has often been a dumping ground for New Age trips. A few years ago there was an American bestseller called Mutant Message Down Under. It was an account of the spiritual odyssey of an American woman in Australia. I quote: 'Summoned by a remote tribe of nomadic Aboriginals to accompany them on a walkabout through the Outback, she makes a four-month-long journey with the 'Real People,' as the tribe calls itself. During this time she learns how they live and thrive in natural harmony with the plants and animals that exist in the rugged geography of the desert region ... It is not too late to save our world from destruction if we realize and honor that all living things(be they plants, animals, or human beings(are part of the same universal oneness. All live in a beautiful state of interdependence. If we heed the message, our lives, like the lives of the Real People, can be filled with this great sense of purpose.'

One of the particularly dicey things about this book is that when it first came out it was unclear to the reader whether it was non-fiction or fiction. Mutant Message Down Under claimed for itself some kind of essential connection with indigenous Australia that bestowed a deeper understanding of the environment. No doubt many non-native writers on India, or indeed on any country that is not their own, could be accused of this: of drawing on some kind of figment of authentic culture to give their work spice.

So, to write about India or not to write? My ambivalence about this subject has led me to represent the heroine of my novel Geography (2004) as a woman who is also ambivalent about such matters. She is travelling in India, but is uncertain of her status as a tourist. She is cynical about the search for 'authentic' experience, which means she moves through the country without trying to get close to it. This, she comes to realise, is as awkward as trying to get too close. Since I wrote Geography I have become braver. Perhaps because I have now read so many books about India and been there so many times I think I can find a way to say something that is true: even if only in a modest way, even if only in a way that makes sense of Westerners' experience of that country. A large part of my next novel is set in India and Nepal, though I am still searching for some sense of internal authority that will enable me to write these scenes with confidence.

Another mea culpa. Reading about, writing about, trying to understand India allows me not to read about, write about or understand Australia. I find our country's appalling human rights records distressing but I find myself lapsing into a kind of pessimistic passivity whenever I think about it. Easier, perhaps, to worry about poverty overseas than down the road. India is, in that sense, an easy way out.

None of this explains why my particular obsession is India(it just explains why I feel awkward about it. Here is one thing I expected of India on my first trip there. I went because it was a spiritual place. I wanted to be a spiritual person. On that in many ways ill-fated trip, I wandered from amazing place to amazing place in the hope of becoming, you know, spiritual. Like spirit was just one of the many bugs you could pick up there. I really believed that if I had a destiny with a particular religion I would bump into it, our eyes would meet across a crowded room and I would become -ta da - Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist. At that age I am not sure I even knew the real difference between those religions. They're all Eastern, right?

Perhaps I am being harsh on myself. It is true that I felt a real connection with the Buddhist temples I visited (which were, on that trip, mainly in Nepal(Buddha's birthplace). Something did shift in me at that time and drove me to try to figure out what I actually meant by spirituality and what Buddhism, in particular, was. After first visiting Kathmandu's Monkey temple and the stupa at Bodanath I had vivid dreams, which affected decisions I made for many years to come.

Buddhism complicates my relationship with India, as that religion was displaced from India around the seventh century. Most of the temples I visit in India are Hindu, not Buddhist, and the larger Buddhist communities are a result of the influx of Tibetan refugees since 1959. This means many of the places I visit in India are refugee communities such as Dharamsala in the far north, where there is, predictably, tension between the local Indians and the more recent arrivals.

'Who do you like best, the Indians or Tibetans?' one person I met in Dharamsala asked me, as if that place was some kind of ethnic zoo. It was a common question. Dharamsala and the current struggle to save Tibet, culturally and politically, from China's heavy hand lead to another argument about authenticity. Who is more Tibetan now, those who left Tibet and live in India, or those who stayed, and suffer China? Where, as Patrick French asks in Tibet, Tibet, does one find the mind's Tibet?

Each year India is swamped by millions of pilgrims from South-East Asia, Japan and Korea as well as Tibetan refugees and Western Buddhists. They come because it is on the great plains of India that Buddha once used to walk and teach. Many of them descend on the place where he was enlightened, Bodhgaya, and the temple first built by an Indian emperor around 250 BC to commemorate that event. Some claim the bo tree there is the very one that Buddha sat under on the night of the full moon, but that seems unlikely. What is likely is that it is a sapling taken from a sapling of the original tree. There is no doubt that for Buddhists this is a special place.

There is a hitch, though. This temple is in Bihar state, one of the poorest, most corrupt states in India. As William Dalrymple puts it in The Age of Kali: 'Two thousand years ago, it was under a bo tree near the Bihari capital of Patna that the Buddha had received his enlightenment; that, however, was probably the last bit of good news to come out of the state.'

People do not drive there at night for fear of being held up by armed robbers. I met several people (Westerners and Indians) who had had guns held to their heads. Murder and poverty are an intrinsic part of life there.

When I was there the Bodhi temple was fighting for World Heritage status, but that goal would only be achievable if the beggars and the villagers who sell you flowers and postcards on the way in could be induced to move away from the area round the temple. A World Heritage site, it seems, cannot be a place of commerce. This was going to be tricky, because what else was in this Buddhist business for the locals other than the chance to make some money? Many of the villagers are Hindus. Over the centuries they have used bricks and stones from the temple to build their homes. For them Buddha only has meaning as one of ten avatars (emanations) of Visnu. That is, he is one of many gods, while those who come to worship him are just more of many tourists.

India is chaotic. India is aesthetic. India is cheap. India has good food. India is confusing. India wears its history for all to see like so many colourful, dusty and sometimes shiny bangles. The bangles are a case in point. They are made in beautiful colours, glass flecked with gold. You can buy them by the yard and line your limbs with them. Child labourers make these bangles. A friend of mine who lives in India, who is helping to build a nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, no longer buys them for this reason and suggests I don't either. There is another thing. Once you put on these bangles you cannot break them off. That is what the Indian woman at an Indian takeaway food store in Richmond told me. So, even though my arm sweated under them, even though they jangled and woke me as I turned at night, I never removed them. After a year or so, an Australian friend who'd had it with listening to me complain about the constant jingling, grabbed me by the wrist and cut the bracelets off with tin snips. 'It's enough,' he said. 'With the superstition.'

In India you have to give up control. In India you have to learn patience. In India, the spirit, like sport, matters; it is nothing to be embarrassed about. One reason India can be so invigorating is that it does not separate the spiritual from the secular. This is also, of course why horrors, most notably Partition, and more recently the emergence of extreme right Hindu groups like the BJP, have occurred.

There is another thing. In India you can pretend appearances don't count, although they do. White boys in raggy beards, bare feet and dirty pants may think they look like sadhus, but it is only the sadhus who will give them the time of day. Girls in strappy bra-less tops may feel encouraged by the heat, and fellow tourists, to think that they can let it all hang out, but the Indians will think they are sluts. In Karma Cola Gita Metha writes of Peace Corp workers who buy abused children and then freak because their six-year-old purchase is offering them a head job.

What India has taught me is that contradictions are an essential part of experience. In India you can have the best and worst day of your life in the same twenty-four hours. You can sit still in the desert night under the stars and be approached by a man playing a flute who will sit and play notes so pure you can hear them soar up to the heavens. Then you can be given a lassi with so much bhung in it your friends appear to turn into skeletons. Or you can have a moment such as the one I had on my last day in India, in the city then called Calcutta, when I was first there all those years ago. There was a beggar posted out the front of the hostel, it was his patch. His limbs were twisted up behind his torso and he needed a skateboard to drag himself around. Now I realise he had polio but at the time I didn't know what had knotted him up. He asked me for money and I said I had none, as I was about to leave the country. Then he invited me to join him in some chocolate cake that a Japanese tourist had given to him. I sat with him and we ate cake and he asked me about Australia and we talked about his wife and children.

I left realising that the world was a much more complex place than I had previously understood. I saw the depth of my ignorance and in that was a joy(having seen it I could begin to undo it, though I now see that any process of learning is just a gradual revelation of how deep that ignorance really is. To give up to not knowing, to be uncertain of the name of things, is a revelation. That space is the place where possibility lives. This is another thing India has taught me. Perhaps it is the most important thing.

You can be uncertain whether you have the right to be in India or the right to write about it, but you should do it anyway: just try to do it well. Whatever you choose to do will be both the right and the wrong thing. Be mad in, mad about, India.

I can also tell you that at the cricket on 6 January 2004 I had wanted Waugh to get a century(he went out for 80 and we all leapt to our feet cheering, tears in our eyes(but I had wanted India to win. I did a private dance to the sound of the drums the Indian supporters played throughout the day. It was they, not the Aussie boys muttering about towel heads and making jokes about Naan, who moved me.

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