Indian Style [antikvár]

¦i,':;' Sí^'-iV.li i FOREWORD By Ismail Merchant and James Ivory when I was growing up in Bombay, no one ever talked about style as it applies to people's houses. There were large houses, where industrialists and movie stars and people like that lived, and there were the other kind, graduating downward in size, where everyone else lived, including myself. All of these habitations, great or small, were at the mercy of Bombay's habitual heat. Every house had blackened peeling walls, including those of millionaires. Vou didn't notice that because every house mildewed in the monsoon. When you took fresh-starched clothes out of the almirah, they were already damp and drooping, and the pages of the books got spots on them that never came out. Periodically, men came to whitewash the blackening walls, most often washing them with a bright blue distemper. My father always had our walls brightened with oil paint because it lasted longer. When I was about two. my parents, who had been living with my grandmother, moved into a small apartment in the middle of the Bhindi Bazaar, an area inhabited by many Memon Muslims, the community to which I belong. The apartment house was five stories tall, with two apartments to a floor. Our family consisted then of my parents, my three elder sisters, and myself. In time, three more daughters arrived. Until my older sisters were married, nine of us lived in two rooms, not counting the kitchen and bath. One of these two was my parents' bedroom, but sometimes it overflowed when relatives came to visit For furniture there was a double bed and a big clothes cupboard, called an almirah (a Portuguese word), and some small trunks along the walls and under the bed. The other room - the living room (in Bombay this room is called the "hall") - was where my sisters and I usually slept, on seven thin matresses laid out on the floor. During the day these were rolled up and stored away. There was a sofa covered in leather, a sort of club sofa. To say it was Art Deco would be too grand. What seemed grand, to our eyes, was my mother's glass-fronted cabinet of small treasures. There were odds and ends of silver in it pieces of china and glass, dolls, souvenirs -the kind of collections seen everywhere in the world in middle-class people's houses. My father sometimes liked to sleep out on the balcony, and at night the servant lay down on the kitchen floor. In those days there was no refrigerator and no modern stove, or other appliances apart from the sink. The cook worked over a spirit stove, or even a bucket of coals. Since nothing could be refrigerated, only what could be consumed in a day was brought home from the markets and cooked. Ice came up from the bazaar when we needed it to make cold drinks. Sometimes the cooking was done outside on the stair landing. When we ate, a mat was laid out on the kitchen floor spread with the dishes and we all things like that There was a framed view of the dmgah at Amjer, the shrine to Khawja Mohinuddin Chistie, the favored saint of our family. There was als of course, a picture of the Kaaba Mecca. When I think of how tod my own walls are jammed with a sorts of pictures I hardly bother t glance at, and my rooms filled with useless furniture, I wonder how this could have happened. When 1 see Bombay apartments now and compare them with thf one I grew up in - I'm speaking c quite modest ones, nothing fane of middle-class In passion for color kitchen gadgets.; telephones, not t refrigerators, whii replaced in the hi today's status syr was a radio made company called C Our rooms were rather than thing: Beyond our cr; :ones. nothing fancy by the buying mania ss Indians, with their ;ets. and glitzy-looking not to mention big which have been he hall by the VCR as js symbol. All we had made in India by a lied Chicago Radio, were full of people, - really an extension ofi biggest room of all, the: where so many Indians much of their living Mil my countrymen seem :d apartment f it - was the ed to carry on the sort c routine that usually side. The commonest of these, which every tourist notices, is outdoor bathing: people washing themselves from a spigot in a courtyard or a broken water main in a street, or perhaps ritually on the banks of the hversjumna and Ganges. Another common sight is of people fast asleep out in the open, usually on rooftops, sometimes on the lawn, and (too often) in the street, when there is no other place to lie. For people with a rooftop, charpoys. basic Indian beds, are brought out on summer nights before the monsoon arrives, and the whole family lies together under the stars. When Indians go abroad, this is one of the things we miss the most. Or perhaps it is the memory of past family closeness in the proximity of those many beds. My sister Amina had some rather grand in-laws. She married into the family of Sir Suleman Kasam Mitha, who had been knighted by the British for the conciliatory role he played among Indian Muslims at the turbulent time of Indian Independence. The Mitha family occupied a very large bungalow in the Nepean Sea neighborhood, next to the Aga Khan's. It has since been pulled down and replaced by a high-rise luxury apartment house. I think this was the first big house I was ever taken to. This vanished bungalow was approached by a flight of marble steps which led up to a wide veranda also paved in marble. There was a lot of comfortable rattan furniture, and I I INTRODUCTION By Steven R.Weisman Ifthereissuchathingas an epiphany that can crystallize the experience of living in India, mine was at the fabulous Hindu religious festival at Hardwar on the banks of the Ganges River in the Himalayan foothills. On a sultry day at dawn, the air was heavy with the pungent fragrance of cardamom, lotus blossoms, and hashish as hundreds of holy men, with long matted hair and flowing beards, many of them naked, marched into the river for their ritual baths. These holy men, or sadhus, had come from their ashrams in the dense forests or mountain caves where they live in silence, in the evening, other Hindu pilgrims lit tiny candles, set them on leaf boats, then pushed them off across the surface of the water, so that the scattered, bobbing flames mirrored the canopy of stars overhead. The Hardwar festival, embodying the odd mixture of tawdriness and spirituality that is India, commemorates a legendary battle between gods and demons over a vessel of sacred nectar, which, according to the Hindu scriptures, spilled at twelve spots in the universe, four on earth and eight in the heavens. I have always thought ever since that the ratio was about right: at least two-thirds of India must be taken on faith. Perhaps this is why writers caught up in India struggle so hard to describe being overwhelmed by vast spaces and multitudes of humanity, and even more by the immense world ofthe Indian spirit. Of course, Indians work every day in the real world to lift themselves out of the wretchedness and suffering that has been their lot for centuries. But Indian philosophy is also rooted in deeper principles of immersion, abandonment ofthe self and finally, acceptance. Before thinking about India, Westerners have to clear their minds of prejudice, unclench their fists, and look beyond the miseries and splendors ofthe surface. In a famous formulation cited by Sigmund Freud, the novelist Romain Rolland spoke of the "oceanic feeling" of India. That same essence was captured even more perceptively by the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, who in his biography of Mohandas K. Gandhi suggested that India exists in a kind of feminine space, as if Father Time in India were a woman. Erikson spoke in this context of the "sense of being enveloped, embedded, and carried by the world." India is a country of 800 million people, thousands of gods, hundreds of castes, dozens of languages and dialects, and several LEFT: /I shopper buys her fresh vegetables from one of the dozens of men and women who gather each day with their homegrown produce at Sardar market in the old city in jodhpur. Rajasthan.