Monday, October 19, 2015

Ladakh, the Roof of the World


Ladakh and Hinterland Economies in Relation to the Nation State.
In 1974,  as a second year Sociology student at Miranda House, Delhi, I accompanied my relatives,(Malayalis, who were living and working in Quwait) to Kashmir, as they needed someone who would help them in their journey in North India, as they did not have  any Hindi. We got off the train, at Jammu, were surrounded by loud haranguing coolies, and then got into the bus for Srinagar. A double rainbow, like an arc in the sky greeted us at Srinagar, known to Malayalis through  the philosopher and mystic, Adi Sankara’s travels from Kaladi in Kerala. The taxi driver taking us about,  was confronted with a speeding driver, to whom he shouted “Tu Jammu se AAya hai?” to which my relatives wanted a translation from me, for the  mutual hostility it raised in both the drivers. Invectives too have a Sociological explanation, steeped in history.  We lived for a week, in an ostentatious newly constructed houseboat,  smelling of pine, which the owner said had cost him a lakh to build. And then we went to Pahalgam, and leaving my relatives, at the base of the hill, I started to climb the glacier at Sonamarg. I climbed only a little way, but the euphoria that filled my head was the most amazing experience. I was summoned back by my cousin to join the group. I am grateful to have that experience which has always stood by me as the real mystical experience of the beauty of the world. It was on that visit, we saw trucks with jubilant foreigners, going up the mountains, and the taxi driver said “They are going to Ladakh”. The Shangri-La of Tibetan culture had just been made accessible.


Ladakh has been known as a travel entrepot for many centuries as it was on the Silk Route, on which tea and gold were also exchanged with precious jewels. Today, it is of strategic importance since it hosts an astronomy laboratory, and invites upto 50,000 tourists a year. Leh had 44 hotels in 2010, and Kargil is a battle site, which has seen many sacrifices. The stakes of  the Nation State  in Ladakh are huge, with regard to the intrusions of the Chinese and the Pakistanis, which are frequent. The Airforce on August 20th  2013, landed its Super Hercules transport aircraft C-130J-30, at the world’s highest airstrip at Daulat Beg Oldie in Ladakh, which the Government  representatives say can carry 100 passengers, and can fuel helicopters, additionally,  during relief work during  natural or human made disasters or war.  When we look at Ladakh today, we know that its integration into the Nation State is the way in which politicians see its significance in the survival strategies of modernism. How can civilians avert war?
If state tourism is one prong, so is the work of intellectuals. By integrating with the communities they study, the Sociologist links up in interdisciplinary frameworks, where knowledge production becomes connected to familiarity with terrain.  The assimilation of others, new comers,  into the society being studied, becomes possible, because of the assumption that  the strangers who enter an arena, which is both a tactile space, as well as carefully  marked in international codes of surveillance and possession, (and counter claims based on previous acts of aggression),  will become the index of its belonging to the Nation state. Ladakh has a long and interesting history, which goes back to the Neolithic age, and though its population was once “3 people a square mile”, typical of herding and hunting and pastoral societies in the past. Today, we are talking of a knowledge explosion, for all interactions are mutually facilitating, where experiencing Ladakh is seen to be the dream of the tourist. What does this say for climate change, and the carbon trail, when there are daily flights to Ladakh from Delhi, with all the major airplane companies?
Climate Change is now an accepted fact of post modern experience. Our life style changes have meant that the earth has heated up considerably, and what are called glass house emissions is matched by the over sell of nuclear energy, whose risks to the earth have been written about considerably. Climate Change is also part of the history of the Universe, so we have to accept that the earth has its own momentum, irrespective of what we may or may not do. The hot springs that dot the Ladakh landscape only prove how close the magma may be, and why the geomorphology of the earth creates its own iridescent beauty in landscapes such as the Ladakhi one. The people are now a diaspora in many parts of India, and with tourism, the food habits and the dress of the local people will have undergone tremendous change. Ladakh cannot support a population larger than the ability of its hinterland, which remains a pastoral and agricultural one. And it is with this question that I am most concerned with.
If agriculture and water  management are not related to the terrain,  which is desert with a riverine ecology, the intrusion of large numbers of people, such as us, is both a hindrance as well as a benefit to the local people. Communities in movement, such  as bands of intellectuals or hordes of soldiers bring with them the merchandise of their needs, which the State has to support in order to provide or to generate the acceptability of such integrational policies and  drives.
In 2010, when there was a flash flood from a cloudburst, the Nation watched in horror while mudslides took over the landscape, and while no tourist was reported killed, the local community had many deaths. One of the problems of tracking climate change is the shift away from patterns of the seasons. This obviously affects the expectation of the people regarding the traditional enclaves they thought to be their own. It affects not just agricultural production, but also the ritual calendar. If it is accompanied by a sense of acceptance of fate or destiny, where individuals and communities enter the dread space of not knowing what will happen next, with a measure of equanimity, then normlessness may not arise. Ladakh with its Buddhist predominance has for long been associated with the meditational aspect of life and work as coexisting. However, with the new lifestyles which are a result of the osmosis between tourists and local population, the difficulties which the young face can only be imagined. Cuisines which have centred around barley and yak butter are replaced with the volatility of tourist demands. Interestingly, Tibetan influenced food, the simple noodle soup called Thukpa has become the star element in multinational star cuisines in the capital city of Delhi. Ornaments associated with the Ladakhis which have been the context of trade relations with the Chinese and with the Europeans for millennia are now back in the ethnic market as objects to be desired. Pashmina remains the elusive wool that is the brand mark of the luxury market. The Nation State will covet the metals of the mountains, and the Ladakhis will fear the industrialising motif of the greed for metals, which make every mountain national property, unless peoples’ movements communicate that right to life and organic farming are the post modern valuables of the 21st century.

Given the complex maze of ruralism and the tribes in  co-existence, which makes middle class tourists lust for fragmentary experience of traditionalism, it is the job of the sociologists to protect the rights of farmers and pastoralists. When change is rapid, and the assimilation of the young happens in diverse ways in the new age fraternitites of tourism and trade and modern education, we need to accept the non-judgementality of the Social Sciences as its first axiom. The morality or amorality of political parties is a case in point. When Kashmir is sought to be trifurcated according to religion, then the secular constitution is  the measuring rod by which the army’s presence or even President’s Rule is imposed. What does this say for personal freedom? How do we notate the ways in which the Chinese and Pakistani presence is omnipresent if newsreaders of Headlines Today are to be understood? As the former Air Vice Marshal said,  words to the effect, “Do we take into our cognizance our own actions on the border when reporting news?” Land which was appropriated during the merger of the  autonomous princely states with Independent India, still remain as occupied territories today, and the said governments continue to infiltrate into Indian territory, to the amazement of those who believe in the Peace process. These are representations of use value for millennia, when we presume that the emotions of feudal communities of warriors are new, we have to remember that over two centuries Tibetan rule in the medieval period was replaced by Muslim, and Muslim, by the Secular in the case of Ladakh. Given that Tibet has been colonised by the Chinese, the Tibetan influence in Ladakh for millennia is now replaced with the idea of the Indian Citizen, and that is why we as intellectuals have congregated  sporadically in Leh for more than two decades to prove that Indians have the right to free mobility in the Nation. Dards and Mon, Muslims, Buddhists, Moravian Sects of Christians, Hindus, Secular representatives of the modern state are all embodiments of the relationship between past and present. The dialogue of religions is one of the important aspects of religious co-existence. The photographic archive for Ladakh, by  Benoy Behl has been well utilised by the Nation State, and the general public, including their frequent publication by The Hindu and the Frontline, in Chennai, with its archaeological and contemporary focus, to show that India is  relitiously multi faceted.
The interest value that the Rimpoches and monastery art has, is further underlined with the upsurge of interest in Buddhism by the middle class /elite, a variety of deep interest in meditational practise and transcendence, while living in the world and financially contributing to the maintenance in Budd very different from the Ambedkarite one. Art historians, like Behl have understood that architecture and art forms represent the joy of aesthetics, as well as the political connotations of art production, not just enjoyment. Gerhard Wulf, of the Getty Foundation in Florence, gave a six month course  in School of Arts and Aesthetics JNU in  Winter Semester, 2013, on the process by which maps may be read from the 11th to  16th century as a process by which one understand the Silk and Pepper Routes  linking Europe, Asia and Americas, as not just trade routes, but a way by which we understand ambassadorial gifts from the kings and nobility and traders to one another in different geographical locations. Mapmaking, as much as gift giving, were often the unintended consequence too of war and looting, which linked China, India, Africa with Europe and what was called the New World. Through this, textiles, motifs, architecture, objects of daily use and veneration, passing through the well known traders’ routes by land and sea, would be permeated by the cultures of the people who made and used them. The most beautiful of these objects would survive war and destruction, and be protected in the museums of the wealthy. Clearly, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban, and the destruction of the Iraqi Museum in Baghdad, by the Americans is a case in point.  Ladakh needs it Archaeologists, and hopefully a new intelligentsia will arise in this Mountainous district which will represent its own people, whether monks or laypeople in the conservation of its culture.


 SECMOL,  a voluntary organisation which safeguards the interests of herder families and farmers’ children is a case in point. The founders, Sonam Wanchuk and Becky Norman wanted to work with children who were conventionally  thought to be drop outs, as they had failed class 10 or 12 in the regular schooling system, and were integrated in an alternative discourse that prioritised vocational skills such as farming, solar energy, recycling, crafts, language learning and proficiency, accounting, tourism, cooking and so on. The twenty year successes of the institution have created a buoyant space of reintegration into intellectual and entrepreneurial spaces, which has made SECMOL(Students for environmental and cultural movements of Ladakh) a household name in Ladakh. In the 1990s they started Operation Hope, which Sonam Wangchuk saw as an essential need within Ladakhi society, to rewrite text books which would then contextualise the specific learning needs of the  children he and his team worked with. Educationists who specialised in the writing of science and social science text books were called in from Hoshangabad (Eklavya) and from the larger subcontinental networks in South India, including Kerala (KSSP).

Kerala, in a comparitive framework, was able to safeguard its cultural landscape by the efforts of the Nairs to revive their traditional arts and skills. However, with regard to architecture, it can only be said that both Communism and the Gulf Diaspora had no interest in the past, as objects of beauty. Specially now, with rapid social change, and loss of skills, Agriculture and its allied production of textiles (the famous cottons known to the Romans) and pottery have declined, but revivalism of this traditional craft in Andhra Pradesh, by Dastkar has been interesting for sociologists to study. Today, traditional objects are very much in demand and Design Schools all over the country as Government institutions are only too anxious to reproduce the materials which the five thousand year civilisation of India represents. This civilisation, the Indus civilisation is known as the Indo Gangetic civilisation, and is of course a myth which is useful for the state to dispense with, since India is much larger than its Aryanised depiction. However, it has remained useful for purposes that M.N. Srinivas called “Sanskritic Hinduism” a Pan Hinduism, which allowed Kashmiri Pundits and Bengali Brahmins to eat meat, and for Nairs to represent themselves as Kshatriyas, or for Syrian Christians to present themselves as apostasied brahmans from the 1st century, depicting in each case as adaptive to this process. Tibetan influenced Buddhists do the same in Ladakh.
However, the Dravidian South has been extremely clear that its process of mythification of the past also goes back five thousand years, and so the essential process of bridge building of languages and culture has been left to the local communities, and to the emissaries of the nation state during the peaceful intermissions when societies wish to promote the dialogic incentive that allows them to live and reproduce. Keralites have never imagined that all of them will return at the same time, but today, when two generations of Diaspora living and working in India, and also in the many Gulf countries, America, UK, Canada, Australia  have returned, the post modern convenience-flat residences built for them in the suburbs of the formerly quiet cities of Trivandrum, Cochin and Ernakulam have not only brought about rapid urbanisation, so that 60 percent of Kerala is now traffic-jam urbanised, but the effects on agriculture have been huge. This means that  agricultural labour has become manual labour for production of these new high rise extensions, and the rural belts are now self conscious entrepots of agriculture,  dealing with pepper, rice,  spices, and other such commodities for a new market, without a working class population to really support it. Climate change as experienced by the Malayali farmer, who still believes that agriculture is an occupation, and does not classify it as a hobby, is dependent upon traditional artisan and slave castes.
Specialists in this conference will be able to guage how food grown for the family is different from food grown for the market, how family labour is different from recruited and hired labour, and the debates around the morality of farming itself, which includes questions about what is grown and for whom. This would extend from market gardening such as apples, apricots, melons and water melons, saffron and botanical herb plantations,  to illicit poppy cultivation.  In a visit to Takmachik, which has been earmarked as an Organic Village for Tourist purposes, the apricot growers have received a commercial offer from a well known Swami dealing in ayurvedic products to sell their lower grade apricots at five rupees a kilo, and the request is for twenty thousand kilogrammes. The Tata company also requests sale of first grade apricots, price not stated, which will be transported, as easily damaged goods by their scouts to Delhi and Mumbai. The farmers are perplexed by the offers, but are happy that they can avail of the opportunities which labelling their remote village as “organic farming” gives to them. Cultural shows are also part of the package, as tourists will be entertained by the residents according to season and festival. (feldwork interviews, courtesy Tashi Lundup, September 2015)
When people live in the zone of a very young mountain range (in geological terms) do they accept that they are living in a zone of imminent danger? One may ask the same question of people living in the city of Delhi where it is dangerous to cross a road. The task of the Sociologist studying consumerist societies and subsistence societies remains the same, what are the risks, and how do people come to terms with their life choices? Margaret Mead in her book New Lives for Old examines the way in which the Manus people of the Admiralties developed a sense of their own incorporation into the American world view. Imposition by the State, in terms of its various hegemonies, is the way by which it unfolds its future plans, and sometimes the intellectual plays the part of the professional harbinger of violent social transformation. Adaptation is the key to survival is the basic rule of life. The protection of  traditionally impoverished communities, technically called subsistence societies, (which might on the other hand have a wealth of knowledge, useful to the changed circumstances of a disaster prone world) is as much part of the Sociologist’s self appointed tasks, as is value neutrality.
In The Visiting Moon, the protagonist says,
“How tired the earth must be of our constant presence, how much it must yearn to go back to the days of innocence, when nothing was, but just swirling dust. A time it must have been when no emotions rent the earth, when motes of dust gathered and swelled and separated and settled again, when there were no symbols to be deciphered, and no wars to be evaded. And then there must have come the rain, for centuries, imagine, rain, just falling till there was nothing but rain. Of course the earth is burdened and wishes to shrug us off. “ ( Visvanathan 2001:120)
The passivity of people to cloud bursts, and unseasonal rain is a result of their conditioning in cultural terms. Japanese witnesses to the earthquakes and Tsunami said much the same thing, when asked about fortitude as a cultural trait of their people. “We are trained to accept the possibility of earthquakes as part of early rearing practises.”
Today, the State might well be sending in intellectuals to Ladakh, to prove that moon country is essentially a habitat, as metaphor at least. Density of floating populations and the time and seasons of its presence is probably the need of the hour for analyses, since in places like Nepal, Goa and Kerala, there have been acute problems of how to tackle garbage, or tourist accommodation.
Climate change has brought in a new occupation in the last two decades, in Ladakh, yet we know that farming is related to tourism in very specific ways, for organic foods are the key index to the discerning customer of what is most desirable in the exotica of travel. In Kerala, the state provides agriculture several kinds of support: rice lands may not be sold for construction, organic farming is supported, terrace gardening and intensive gardening will be given every possible support. Agricultural societies are the spine of the tourist industry, including dependent artisanal and fishing and sea related activities receiving the same kind of assurance of state attention. In mountain regions, the problem that Chhering Tandup has always asserted is that of movement of goods. How do we ascertain that the farm produce from Leh reaches its metropolitan outlets, such as Chandigarh and Delhi?
There is a problem here. As many as the trucks that arrive in Leh, the greater the degree of pollution. The greater the loss of the natural habitat, and the extent of damage will be difficult to assess. If geologists say that whatever glacial damage or melt is due to activities that occurred 7 million years ago, then we may rest assured that the sending in of trucks to Leh from Chandigarh and Delhi would mean the erosion of these very new and constantly developing mountains faster than 7 years.
What industrialisation can mean is that local consumption of food and beverages is replaced by alcohol and drug abuse, which is always blamed on migrant labour, or on tourists. The work of a new generation of scholars, such as Sumera Shafi and Tashi Lundup for Leh show how increased wealth from tourism has brought about substantial changes in  world view of the youth.
Why  agricultural practise in the surrounding villages of Leh is extremely interesting is because it is new, and instinctive, since with the planting of trees by the Army precipitation is conclusive. a symptom of new world policies. The soil is alluvial and very rich.  Interior colonialism, including constantly, the emphatic presence of the Army,  since 60 percent of the army is stationed here, is not seen to be a cultural colonialism. Protection from China, and assimilation into China is not desired by Ladakhis. Unlike Kashmir, where the Army is deeply resented for it’s very visible coercive arm,  Ladakhis have a tolerant and supportive relation to the presence of the Indian army of which they too are a part. Employment in the Army is a definitive occupation for Ladakhis.
Agriculture sustains the Army, whether it is apricots, potatoes, beans, asparagus, grapes, apples, tomatoes or leeks. Tourism and the Army are two of the stable institutions of the Ladakh region. Kashmiri merchants now face the inherent space of competition from Ladakhi craftspeople and merchants. That pashmina is manufactured in Leh was in doubt, until a new generation of scholars from Jammu University brought to collective attention the presence of local boutiques and pashmina wool curing factory. Surely, climate change is part of the way in which new processes are brought into focus with regard to the dangers and losses that climate change present, where equally, new avenues present themselves. The pashmina sheep died after the 2011 cloud burst because of the loss of pastoral grounds. Yet, the supply of Pashmina did not abate according to the manager of the factory, because the supply of wool continued to come from other areas in Ladakh, who was very confident that he could get his sources come what may.  (Interview courtesy Tstenzin and Tashi, September 2013)
This is the curious aspect of Agriculture and related artisan activities: whatever the nature of loss, the beneficence continues. How do we deal with redistribution of goods is what industrial systems have not dealt with. The industrial imagination is so bereft of the sense of the future, that they do not have the way of dealing with the bonus of nature. Crop destruction is part of capitalism, by letting grains to rot, the industrial system makes sure that prices are inflated. By buying up from the farmer without ensuring redistribution, it leaves the farmer with cost price, and a rupee’s profit on every kilo, while ensuring that granaries burst and the prime minister and the Reserve Bank congratulate the farmers. Surplus crops means a stable economy, since post office and SBI keep the peasant earnings in sync with subsistence agriculture which is generally against Conspicuous Consumption. However, the capitalists look to conspicuous consumption for an active market, and the circulation of money, so they do all they can to disrupt the basic socialist  (a constitutional term) practise of the Indian economy, which is in the very nature of social relations.  Since no redistribution takes place, after goods are cornered by the Government the food rots.  Establishment social scientists believe that two and a half acres is impractical and that industrialised farming to feed the billions is possible only after the farmers are dispossessed, brought to the city to build smart cities which do not include them. Here they are kept in poverty, below the minimum wage, as the contractors subtract the costs of bringing them to the city. The Leh district farmers have shown that farming is enjoyable and that they eat well and have enough for others, if the Army is not the only buyer. In Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu pilgrimage and tourism has been supported through the interlinkage of local cafes with the rural markets of the hinterland hill stations in the Nilgiris.
Sociologists do not have a solution for climate change. They cannot tell the victims of flood that this has nothing to do with good governance or bad, or with ritual purity, or Allah’s grace, or Siva’s wrath. This has to do with geological timings of catastrophes, which does not match human or historical time. While Leh survived the flash flood, it’s town and village councils have a lot to do with the rehabilitation measures. Its autonomous hill councils’ functioning helped the villagers because of the level of trust, and the close and personal regulation of water in the villages helped for further development of its agriculture techniques. Each family sends a representative in turn to sleep by the village pond to control water utilization and possible theft at night.  (interviews courtesy Harjit Singh, Tashi Lundup, September 2013)
 There is a lot that we can learn from the Ladakh experience of organisation and technique, made possible too from the lessons which the local intelligentsia brings to us through intimacy and translation. Such a grass roots intelligentsia is yet to develop in Kashmir to  reckon with its own needs. Painful though this period is, the velocity of distress has its anodyne, the creation of institutional dialogue, which is community inclusive, rather than separatist. Just as Ahmedabad burned in 2002, without any administrative attention, and Delhi too, during the Sikh genocide,  both of which were humanly created disasters, three days, after the 2014 September floods,  the people in Kashmir waited for the Administration and for Government help, including the Army. The Government said, “We can do nothing.” . (interview with Councillor Shafi, September 2015)  Why was that? Should they not be accountable for what they do or do not do? People’s governance and people’s autonomy must mean that villages and towns must have an immediately recognisable task force to generate support during disasters. It must also mean that the State and the World Bank, is implicated in the disasters, (which called Natural are usually exaggerated by human culpability,) when it supports  dam construction, against the wishes of the local people. They must work with the  resource materials garnered by the local intelligentsia, recognise local expertise for its ability to warn capitalism and capitalists of its implication in these massive disasters in seismic zones.
Fault becomes allocated when there are tribunals of enquiry. However, in the case of large scale development, the Gandhians like Rajinder Singh constantly assert that poverty alleviation is not possible with mass scale destruction of people’s livelihoods. Rather than flight from the State, the struggle against interior colonialisms has been protracted. The alternative  view to modernism, is post modernism, which has its freedom to choice, and to resistance of oppression. The so called subsistence societies of pre-modern contexts made sure that it’s people were fed, and provided for in times of stress.  Central Rule often excludes the domination of those societies which are intrinsically, self sustaining.  James C Scott writes that “I emphasise the term political order  to avoid conveying the mistaken impression that outside the realm of the state lay mere disorder. Depending on the location and date, such units might range from nuclear families to segmentary lineages, bilateral kindreds, hamlets, larger villages, towns and their immediate hinterlands, and confederations of such towns. Confederations appear to constitute the most complex level of integration that had any stability at all.” (Scott 2010:36)

In Federal societies, the States are each  given autonomy regarding the choices they make about those decisions pertaining to local communities. Kerala for instance has a Fisheries Ministry, and also supports organic farming as a specific instance of this motivation. When certain States are oil rich or mineral rich, then they become the colonized space of political intentions.  “State power, in this conception, is the state’s monopoly of coercive force that must, in principle, be fully projected to the very edge of it’s territory, where it meets, again in principle, another sovereign power, projecting it’s command to it’s own adjacent frontier. ….As a practical matter, most nation-states have tried, insofar as they had the means, to give substance to this vision, establishing armed border posts, moving loyal populations to the frontier and relocating or driving away ‘disloyal’ populations, clearing frontier lands for sedentary agriculture, building roads to the borders, and registering hitherto fugitive peoples. ( ibid 11) Quite often, Scott argues, the populations at the borders are culturally syncretistic, and they are then forced to conform with the homogeneity of the political order in the plains. “Where they could, however, all states in the region have tried to bring such peoples under their routine administration, to encourage and more rarely, to insist upon linguistic, cultural, and religious alignment with the majority population at the state core.” (ibid 12)
When there is a dramatic contrast between subsistence societies, located in proximity to market towns, with the industrializing motif of traditional development politics, which aggrandizes and hierarchises, we find that local communities survive through varieties of camaflouge. Tradition persists in customs of food, dress and ritual, but there is a segmental aspect, so the coding in of plural forms of identity are implicit. People become home in many different cultures simultaneously. They take on the colours of their environment, merging effortlessly into the work world, and into the recreational structures of multiple societies. This multi causality is represented through coincidental forms of association and unionization both at work, and in leisure, so whether it is the club or the association, individuals know how to fit in the rural milieu as well as the urban one. This is not oscillation but a dialectic. In transition societies this is made possible by the dual languages which are learnt, but when industrialization is complete, then these skills of language and  technique are lost. It is this which makes people truly homeless.
 In this last part of the paper, I will discuss the plea from Prof Bharat Jhunjhoonwala, on behalf of the villagers of Chamoli, where the World Bank is making its loan available, against the wishes of the people, for damming the Ganga, for purposes of electricity generation for the cities.
The game,  for the manipulations between agriculturists and the colonial state in the formative years of sedentarisation of agriculture in British ruled India continues. The rules are not laid down by the colonists, but by the way in which the people demarcate their own borders and territories.
Naturally, therefore, most of the actions of the players in the “game” were largely predictable since the players had trained each other over a long period of time. Not only were the actions of the players anticipated, but each contestant had prepared himself (most of these players were men) psychically for the outcome as well. (Irschick  1994:46)
To be represented in Kashmir, by the village councils of Ladakh is a task in itself, requiring the notation of religion, race, locality, occupation, community and its common subjectivities. In other parts of the Himalayas, the people orient themselves to petitions, law court cases and their hope in citizenship. With the recent floods in Kashmir, the equation between the people and the Centre will change, primarily because the devastation is so huge that the orientations will be to everyday survival. The balance of power rests with the ability to withstand neglect and philanthrophy, both of which are deemed to be ways of hierarchizing the free. Why India is substantially free inspite of it’s poverty and it’s corruption is because land held in agriculture is on an average two and a half acres,  and the industrialising state would love to club it together to facilitate the growing of gmt products under the guise that the farmer with small landholdings is an anomaly.

Traditional small acreage and production of bumper crops annually  is substantially different from Pakistan, where twenty two families controlled the country through their agricultural landlordship.  The damming of the Indus was for industrial purposes and the travails of Pakistan have come from protracted militarisation, tribal revolt and non-democratic practise regarding the fate of peasants and local communities. The gap between the rich and the poor has led to substantial distress, which includes the mobilisation of religious fundamentalists to repress freedom of citizens.
TK Oommen’s work “From Mobilisation to Institutionalisation” showed the success of the land distribution Act in the 1950s to be partially successful since the land given away was usually rocky.  In contrast, what the farmers in the environment of Leh have shown however, is that the resilience that they have as farmers with small landholdings, has depended on their hard work in tilling and watering in tightly regulated circumstances. The village councils have a say in how the water is allocated around the clock. In Palakkad, which became known as the rice belt of Kerala, the water from the local small dam, Mallapuram Dam becomes readily available to farmers in the winter months, not so in the summer, when the primary objective is to provide drinking water to a fast expanding city. The fluctuations of production are obvious to farmers, whose one, two or three crops of paddy are dependent on irrigation, since the ponds become neglected, and with climate change can run dry.(Interview with Agricultural Officers,Palakkad, April 2015)
Emile Durkheim writes, in his comparison of Communism and Socialism, that the former has a moral principle, which abstracts private property to be a lapse of conduct arising from selfishness and immorality, but Socialism is a functional principle of the division of labour and practical economic interests.

The two problems are entirely different. On one side, you set out to judge the moral value of wealth in the abstract, and deny it; on the other, one asks whether a kind of commerce and industry harmonizes with the conditions of existence of the peoples practising it, and if it is normal or unhealthy. Thus while communism concerns itself only accessorily with so-called economic arrangements and modifies them only to the degree necessary to place them in  keeping with its principle (the abolition of individual ownership), socialism, inversely, touches private property the degree required to change it so that it may harmonize with the  economic arrangement – the essential objects of its demands. (Durkheim 1962:73)
Socialism is inherent in what Marcel Mauss showed to be forms of tribalism, or more generally the  collective life of communities. However, in the case of the “Seasonal Variations Among the Eskimo” or the pastoral practises of the Nuer in the 1930s, as studied by Evans Pritchard, we do have interesting views of how social exchange takes place during nomadism, and when people congregate during winter, in the first case, and heavy rains in the second. Hunting and fishing are typical activities during nomadism, and with seasonal shifts, there is a dependence on local activities which are centred around storage and rituals. In the Ladakh region, the storage of fruit and tubers and the dried meats allow people to engage in a very sustained ceremonial and ritual life when the borders and roads shut down. The effervescence of collective life is more than evident. Climate change has to take into account increased melting of glaciers as the way in which the Spring may come earlier, but the long term effects on local habitation are yet to be understood. People do not live in fear of the future, they adapt to the present, and in a democratic system, agriculturists should be protected not left to the vagaries of industrial imaginations, which nullify them by the habit of four hundred years. Coexistence of the agricultural and industrial worlds is provided by the Constitution, which has its Gandhian undertones in citizen rights.
 I provide a  summary of the plea to the World Bank, from Prof Jhunjhuwala who with other signatories, has claimed that the continual damming of the Ganga will influence the fate of the Himalayas in general. They write to the Executive Secretary of the Inspection Panel of the World Bank, that the Pipalkoti project will change their lives because the “joys of a free flowing river” cannot be estimated. Further, the river does not flow past boulders in the case of damming, and will lose its medicinal and therapeutic qualities. According to the petitioners, the people living in Chamoli district, on the banks of the Alaknanda Ganga will not have access to fish and sand, as resources for their livelihood. The Cheer Pheasant, an endangered bird will go extinct. The release of water at odd times during the day for generation of electricity will affect the lives of people who belong to a riverine civilisation and are dependent on nature for their livelihood.  Houses which are near the dam develop cracks because of the force of construction and water flow in the tunnels and pipes. Accumulation of silt affects the lives of communities who are dependent on the river such as fishers and pastoralists. The collection of silt can affect the social and religious life of people who can no longer bathe or pray, or collect water. The aquatic life, both plants and animals becomes disturbed. Very often, the rivers run dry. The dust from construction pollutes every thing. Workers live in terrible conditions. Disease becomes rampant.  Women and children lose their freedoms. The earthquakes further damage the hollowed out mountains, causing landslides and death. The 2013 floods in Uttarakhand were a consequence of ravaged hillsides for short term gains, in a seismic zone. Water sources are drying up, rivers are degraded to the point of becoming extinct. Heat from construction sends up the indexes of global warming. The increase in populations due to construction and deforestation leads to the mass loss of habitat for animal populations which begin to wander causing threat, in turn, to local communities and habitats. Worst of all, there is silence on the part of bureaucrats, and the people are kept out of information and discussion. (Jhunjhunwala 2013, petititon to World Bank)

As the contents of the letter show, the real questions we need to ask are about the management of our rivers as commons. The Indus is dammed substantially in Pakistan, where it flows in India, it has become both a ritual site for Hindus asserting identity politics, as well as for the urbane leisured class who looks forward to playing golf in the highest reaches of the Himalayas. (fieldwork interviews, courtesy Suresh Kumar, September 2013) How do we understand these cultural uses? Do we have a say in the right to life, and the right to traditional grazing grounds. As Scientists and Social Scientists, may we presume that people’s liberties are of the most importance, and by writing about them we delay their extinction or forced assimilation.

In a fieldwork based study organised by Renoj Theyyam, in September 2013, Gergen, Susan, Nasreen, Konchak, Vishwa, Sandeep, Tashi, Revant, Ramesh, Amit and Morup visited Sabu Village on the outskirts of Leh, which had been damaged by the cloud burst in 2011. One of the farmers, George, had worked for the Army and also for All India Radio and his memory was of severe winters upto 1974, where the temperature went to minus 30 and 34. Since 1990 there were no more cold winters, and if the mercury went below 20 or 22 degrees minus, it was only for two or three days. The temperature averaged minus 10 degrees or 20 degrees  Centigrade. Earlier there was lots of snowfall. There would be one or one and a half degrees of snow. It would remain in the fields until end March after which it would melt. Today, the snowfall is five inches, and the next day it would melt. Rainfall patterns too had changed. Rain does fall, though it is a high altitude desert. The normal rainfall in summer time was one or two hours during July and August, and occasionally heavy rainfall, which today is proving to be a national calamity as in 2011 and 2013. While the Army and National Government responded in 2011, yet in 2015 it did not act, leaving it to the Autonomous Hill Council. As the tourism Minister, Shafi Lasu told me in an interview on 5th September 2015,
The problem with climate change and unseasonal rain is that there is vast destruction and loss. In the 2011 floods many people came to see and we got a lot of attention. Rehabilitation was so quick. The Council has no money, the Relief has to come from the State and the Centre. It can only co-ordinate. However, the people too, are not ready to adapt, to make the changes required to survive climate change. I was in charge of Sharah village in Nei. In Phulktse, there was a small quantum of flood. One of the houses was partially damaged. The question to the victim was “How many times has your house been damaged?” I told him to shift or allow us to dig a channel. The man said, “I have only this field.” After a few days, it was totally flooded out, and the house swept away. I told him “We will allot you land on the other side, with the permission of the Sarpanch and the Councillor. Under the Indra Awaz yojana, you will receive 75,000 rupees, and while you are waiting for it, we will allot you 50,000 rupees from the Council.”
The Border people need to be secure, only then can the country be prosperous. With the 2015 floods which  were much worse than the 2011 floods, there was no attention from the medical fraternity or from the Government, though it was widespread, covering all of Ladakh. Deaths were few, but the losses to farmers were huge. There has to be some accounting, particularly since the people make so many sacrifices. The UPA opened a route to the Pangong area. A policy was initiated PWDS 12, where the Border people get tents, shoes, repairs of houses, feed banks for cattle donkeys, goats in ice locked areas.
The border is osmotic for the Chinese, because they treat it like that. They allow people to cross from either side, which the Indian army does not. The Indian army regulates border crossing. In winter, the Chinese cross the Pangong Lake on ice with their herds, and they take over lands and settle there.

As George and his wife Odzin experienced, in the cloud burst of 2011, the winters are changing rapidly. Mild winter is followed by a severe Spring. Since the last ten years, February and March gets very cold till May. Spring has become cold and year dry. In the Flood Year of 2011, the snow did not melt till 23rd of June. Then suddenly, it was very hot. The water melted rapidly. On 23rd of June, their septic tank was empty. Septic tank lies 9 feet below ground. Normally, in March, it gets warm, and the ice slowly melts, and there is good water for irrigation. After 23rd of June , it becomes hot, and the water comes for irrigation. After 23rd June, that year, two septic tanks below 10 feet were full, and there was excess water. Too much water inundated, but crops were not destroyed. The underground tanks absorbed the water. With the help of the motor, the water was pumped out. On 5th of August 2011, a thunderbolt never seen before was heard, lightening was so bright, a needle could be found. The flood came from the Manali road side. At two minutes to midnight, the was KHddddd, strong wind, loud noise, water falling through the chimney. Peter came into the garden to collect a container and was knee deep in water. Behind the house, the tourist resort he runs was swallowed up in a river of water, and the two Nepali guards were drowned. In 1969, there was a cloud burst in Nimu, and in 1974 in Piang village. In this cloud burst, the Government felt no responsibility for commercial aspect of people’s losses. They aided in removing the silt, and gave a lakh of rupees as compensation.
Peter believes that the cloud burst is an aspect of climate change because of the green house effect. He strongly feels that the traditional nalla  allowed the water to flow away, but now the nallas are all blocked and filthy. Encroachment, and the use of nalla by tourist and migrants for bathing, spitting and defaecating, as well as throwing garbage has hugely damaged the environment. The nallas are no longer used for drinking, and people use underground water or spring water for domestic purposes. With the flood of 2011, the nallas  were destroyed, but Government gave money to repair them, and installed hand pumps for local use. Inspite of Sabu having been adopted by former President Abdul Kalam, no help was received. There is a huge amount of water that naturally flows into the Indus without causing harm. During years of the flood, the excess water does not drain off, causing immense loss.
Informants in Ladakh often talk about the chorspon, which is a unique source of water management. March, April and May are the growing season, and it is also the time of scarce water. In the traditional system each family would send a representative to guard the water at night and to operate the channels, so stealing water was not common, because of the tightly regulated system of water use. Four people were chosen from the village, and each is sent out to each house and their duty is to tell the members on which day the water will come to the field. In the 1970s, according to Peter, there was a problem in the peak season from May to the 21st of June. Those growing vegetables had a difficult time. The vegetables grown in Leh are cabbage, cauliflower, peas, potatoes, radish and carrot. Peter used to supply the army with potatoes, wheat, barley and peas. He no longer grows vegetables for sale, as it is consumed in the house and the rest house he runs. Leh market is to slow for him, kilo by kilo is not possible, so he works with an agent who give him half the cost, and keeps the rest. Climate change has not affected his income, as the resort is functional, and guests keep coming in. Cows have enough fodder, but because of the floods, grazing has become difficult, so the cows stay in and are fed dry grass.  He pursues the same occupation as his parents. In this village, Sabu, the crop pattern has not changed. Zho are used for ploughing. For threshing, the cattle are tied with rocks, and go in circles, taking 15 to 20 days. If a threshing machine were used, then it would take a few hours. He does use a tractor for ploughing. He has stopped planting trees every year, for the poplars have become diseased. He does not want to introduce new plants, and he does not encourage NGOs. He wants fencing by trees to be provided by the forest department, and as for six feet of debris brought by the floods, he does not know how to dispose of it.
Stenzin Doma, aged 80 describes climate change as fluctuation in weather, where autumn has now become very cold, and harvesting takes place. She says that earlier, in winter, the leaves would shed from the boughs, but now they stay on, and the snow is only ½ feet on the ground. In the earlier times, everyone would go for grazing their sheep, cows, yaks and goats, but now, because children go to school, they do not. She has one cow, and one ox. In the summer they take them where there is water. Thirty or forty years ago, they would graze their cattle in summer in another part of the Nubra and in Shok. For her climate change is perceptible, as it is currently very hot weather, and winters too are warm. Earlier water was more than sufficient, but now, due to divergence of water, it is less, in Spring and Autumn, but there is more water in winter. Because there are these changes, there is a lot more fighting for water. Earlier, there was no fighting. With the Sorpon, there is equal distribution. People sleep near the water to protect it from theft. While there is an increase in material comfort, with technological innovations, there is a lack of mental comfort. After the (2011) floods, the government is rebuilding the channels and ponds. There has never been a problem with fodder in Sabu village, as there is a lot of alfa alfa and grasses. Since there is a lot of house construction, the materials come from outside, so education and jobs are important, and salaries are essential.
Tsering Chonzum (age 60) says that in the old days they only grew palak, but now there is ‘everything”. Hot weather now, so more things grow, seedlings are sometimes brought from Lahaul Spiti and other places. Rainfall is very scanty, but now the rain falls regularly and very heavily in the summer months. In hot weather, water is more, because “ice” melts. Glacier is there in winter, it is snow that melts slowly. Climate change has increased village production of vegetables. In dry weather, they are dependent on government subsidies. She has property in Leh, and runs a guest house. She says, till five years ago, they had goats and sheep, for wool and manure, but now she has only buffalos. The floods left behind a lot of debris, making cultivation difficult, and the sorpon in Leh is in deficit. In Sabu, they are buying barley and wheat husk from Eastern Ladakh villages. Very few houses are keeping cows, since most have government jobs. Trees are being planted substantially. Earlier, only one home had an apple tree, but now everyone has apple trees. Saplings were brought from the western part of Ladakh, but now they buy saplings from Ley. Previously, they ate barley, with palak soup, but now everything is available. Wheat, rice and noodles are plentiful in the shops. There is a rice subsidy from the Government. Army introduced them to sweet tea. There has been an army camp in the vicinity for thirty years. There used to be heavy snow fall in Khardulanga, so the army used to settle in the Leh region. In Leh, they have a guest house. Their children are guides, cooks, helpers. In Leh they  have vegetables for their use, and also to sell in the Leh market. In Sabu, they sell through their agent for fifty percent of the whole value. After, the floods, Indians started arriving, though earlier, their guests were mainly foreigners.
Tsering Angchuk (age 50) says that in the hot weather, glaciers are melting. In Sabu, there was a glacier, but what we see now, is snow. Earlier 3 ½ feet of snow fell every winter. Because of climate change, cement and bricks are being used. Traditionally, people wore woollen clothes through the seasons, and old people continue to do so even now. The roof was low, houses small, and heat retained as the buildings were made of clay and wood. Greening of the Himalayas and global warming together are affecting Himalayas. In the last two or three years, rainfall is more, snow is less. The downside of the streams are drying, because they were glacier dependent. In the Spring, water is low, wheat barley, peas, potatos, all vegetables are grown. His father had goats and sheep. Now he has only cows. He sells potatoes to the army at Rs 22 a kg. His family was not affected but his grazing land, fields and all his trees were washed away. Government has been repairing, no money was received, but repairs were done.
Yangchin Dolma (age 42) asserts that with climate change, temperatures are rising, and sometimes go up to 37 degrees or 38 degree C. In the same season, June or July, there can be substantial temperature variations, sometimes, very hot, and sometimes very cold.
When she was six or seven years old, there was a sudden change in crops, and the family started growing potatoes, wheat, barley, mustard and rajma, beans, lauki, brinjal, chilli, tomato. In the early days, they grew turnip, palak ( spinach) and carrot. Their income has increased. They sell vegetables and fruit to the Leh Bazaar, and potatoes and onions to the army. They hire a jeep in June and July every day because of the tourist season. She sets out in the afternoon after lunch and returns at 9 pm. Her son and daughter milk the cow and cook the food. When the floods happened, they did not know, as they were far from the street. Main river had been diverted in to channels, and now the main river has dried. They only knew in the morning that there had been a flash flood, for in the night they thought it had been heavy rain.
Sonam (age 41)  describes his youth as a time when the snow was plentiful, and ice would form when they put their foot in the river. He would ski twenty or thirty years from Sabu to Cholamdir. The roads were covered with ice. Temperatures have increased in the last twenty to thirty years.  There is increasing rainfall in last five or six years. There is no continuity. It just suddenly falls. After the cloud burst, there is trauma and fear. When the flood came, they ran away in the jeep. The neighbours could not run, and half their family members and the house were washed away. For water, they are dependent on the snow. This winter, the snow was good, more than expected. Due to the sorpon, he gets water, even if, he is far away form water. In the Spring there is scarcity of water. For the drinking water, Government is making a pond, from which pipes will take water to the houses. The Council advises the PWD. In the flood, he loses Zho and Buffalos. He borrows his neighbours Zho for ploughing. There are 120 Zho in Sabuk village. His wife sends his children to the school and helps him four days during the harvesting season. When he was young they had goats and sheep, and they took them for grazing to the mountains. They got milk, wool for Ladakhi garments, but now they buy from the markets. His mother weaves, and so does his wife. Men also weave the chali or goat’s wool blankets. He sells potatoes to the army for Rs 15 a kg, it was difficult to earn much. Earlier, it was 30 or 35 rupees per kilo, but now everyone sells cheaply. Fertile land makes for excellent Sabu potatos. Other villagers are coming to Sabu for seeds. Since his forefathers’ time, potatoes have been grown in Sabu, but with climate change, apples, other fruit and vegetables have come in.


Zahoor (24)  says that his mother’s sister was washed away, his cousin sister died, her mother died. After the flood, there was heavy rainfall in mid July. In May there is scarcity of water, because the glaciers melt slowly. Ladakh council came immediately to help them, when there was a cloud burst. They had all fled to the hills, and none of them had footwear. Tents were put up. Food was cooked with the help of volunteers. Life returned to normal after twenty five days, wetlands returned to normalcy, those who lost houses are only recovering their properties now. The family grows potatos, capsicums, cucumbers, gourds and melons, cabbage, cauliflower, turnip, onion. When there is too much rain, they stay home, the plants are not affected. There are four sapons in Sabu, so there is no shortage of water. They had sheep and goats then years ago, thirty two, or forty two. They kept them for manure and wool for winter clothing and chali, for making rope. They bought meat when needed from market. Earlier they bought sampa, but now they buy bread and maggi. In the village there is self sufficienty upto summer and autumn. Soaps and cloth are purchased from Leh. They go thrice a week by bus. Parents sell potatoes, onions, carrots at Leh market.
Dolka (30) says that there are less bukharis in use now, and more electrical light with solar panel. She had come from Phiang village six years ago, because there was a scarcity of water there. In Sabu, because of sorpon, there is enough water. In Sabu, they pay upto 30,000 or 40,000 rupees for monitoring the water. The pond is filled twice a year. Every fourteen days, water comes to her field. In the winter, government supplies taps, but only handpumps and spring water is actually available. Water does not freeze now. Because of increased use of handpump the spring is drying up. Tomato, potato, cabbage, cauliflower, mustard, brinjlas, wheat are easily cultivated. Those who have green houses grow vegetables in winter. They have social forestry in the village, but they are drying so no one is looking after them. Not much impact. She was in the house during the flood, went out in the morning.

From all the accounts above, it is clear that Spring and Summer bring a paucity of water. To counter this, Dr Gergen had innovated with a traditional method of creating a bund high up in the mountains, and blocking off the water, so that it would freeze in winter, and gradually melt to allow the water to channel into the fields in Spring. Sonam Wangchuk, with the help of the local monastery in Phiang village, well known for its drought and desert conditions has put in place the ice stupa, an artificial glacier, which saw success on March 5th 2015, though it had many obstacles in its path. The students of SECMOL, were supportive, and helped Sonam Wangchuk to put the paraphernalia in process. In February, having found that the underground pipes had cracked because of the cold, they began the digging of trenches once more, in severe weather, but the water did flow through the pipes, and emerged as a fountain, which froze on contact with the air. When March came the ice stupa melted gradually, providing water to the fields. The plan is now to introduce six ice stupas in 2016. From the melted ice, in Spring 2015, the SECMOL students planted 5300 saplings of which 5000 survived. The
future plans for Phiang, known for desert conditions, and occasional violent flooding of rivulets, is a  solar township, the nucleus of which is a University. The optism of the Ladakh people lie in their ability to safeguard their legacy, through community and political processes, while turning to India for administrative responses.
Acknowledgements: Cherring Tandup, Tashi Lundup,  Morup, Sumera Shafi, Suresh Babu, Renoj Theyyan, Harjit Singh,  Devinder Singh, Becky Norman, Sonam Wangchuk, Rinchen  Dolkar, Nikki Stanzin Yangsit,  SECMOL students and the entire student team from Jammu University, for their hospitality and kindness and friendship, many thanks! Also my family and friends, for the support at all times.

Bibliography
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Eliade, Mircea 1960, Myths Dreams and Mysteries, Harper Colophon, New York.

Hannerz, Ulf  1980  Exploring the City Coumbia University Press, New York
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 Jhunjhunwala, Bharat Request to World Bank with  allied signatories.  Accessed on October 10 2014.http://ewebapps.worldbank.org/apps/ip/PanelCases/81-Request%20for%20Inspection%20(English).pdf

Krishnan, Jyothi, 2009: Enclosed Waters, Property Rights, Technology and Ecology in the Management of Water Resources in Palakkad, Kerala. Orient BlackSwan, Delhi
Mead, Margaret  1956 New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation- Manus, 1928-1953
Mines, Diane P. and Nicolas Yazgi (ed): 2010 Village Matters: Relocating Villages in the Contemporary Anthropology of India. OUP, Delhi
Naqvi, Saiyid Ali,  2013: Indus Waters and Social Change: The Evolution and Transition of Agrarian Society in Pakistan OUP, Karachi.
Rizvi, Janet 2012 Trans Himalayan Caravans: Merchant Princes and Peasant Traders in ladakh  (first published 1999) OUP, Delhi.
Scott, James. C ,2010: The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Orient Blackswan, Delhi.
 www. Ladakh and www, Leh. All pages.
Kaul, M.N   1992 Encyclopaedia of India.  Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Rima Publishing House, Delhi
Visvanathan, Susan The Visiting Moon, Roli Indiaink 2002


Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Diaspora and Memory, IIAS Conference at Shimla, Summer Palace,12th to 14th October


Diaspora and Memory Susan Visvanathan, CSSS, JNU,  submitted 5th October 2015 to Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla for the conference on Religion and Social Diversity, 12th to 14th October.
Indians tend to conflate their personal experience and relocate these in terms of the larger issues they are interested in, in the worlds they simultaneously cohabit . This issue of co-existence of differences, and their ability to relocate the problem of identity in an adaptative measure has been of interest to sociologists for many decades. Living in the world, has meant a certain pragmatism, a certain joi de vivre, a love for the present, and equally an ardour for the past. So, we need to understand why in Hinduism, the long memory captured by smrithi and shruthi are still so evident, not in literate descriptive ways, but also in photographs, forms of orality and landscapes of reterritorialisation, and the theatre of ritual, which includes the arts and dance forms.
Indians domiciled in India now composes 17 percent of the world population, and the figures for NRIs are 1,3799746, People of Indian Origin 17,075280, and Overseas Indians 28,4555026. We know that this demographic visibility is indeed the space of cultural re-orientation. All over the world, people know that the transmigration of ritual and ceremony is the visible way that Indians have communicated a love for the “natal country”, from whom they may be removed in reality, by three generations, or more, and the  concrete symbols by which they show how resplendent this love is. In America, students who enter the universities are immediately drawn into the carnivalesque space of “India week”. Hot samosas welcome them, ( a celebratory break from the cafeteria hamburgers and fries, so ubiquitous in American  student culture).They perform dances from their specific states, and the hall becomes rich with the yells, and cries of jubilation and recognition, and everyone, including the audience, loves dressing up in national costumes. Musicians and dance troops, having professional status are also welcomed, and the quality of the amateur and professional are sometimes equivalent. Senior citizens welcome the young, newly entered into the portals of academia, and these become the spaces where the love for country are then reworked into promises to serve the homeland. Money is collected, votes are garnered, and the vicarious Hinduism felt in exile is made more public by the customary membership into the VHP. For diaspora Indians, this membership makes them feel they belong, this is the only Hinduism that they can participate in, and their donations go a long way in the establishment of right wing Hinduism as a prototype of all that is Indian. As a result, the questions of justice, of reconciliation, with the real text of moral disruption through riots and hate speeches finds no mention in this discourse. Love for homeland obliterates the terror zones  of riots, internecine war, pogroms, where the search for justice and equality continue in daily practise.
Diaspora Hindus recreate their homeland, through the symbols of food, dance, drama and temple ritual. In a way, this is the hyper-reality of their alienated existence far away from home. At work, they wear suits, and eat pizzas, drive fast cars, enter into liasons, both professional and personal, assert their identity against subtle or violent forms of racism, meeting often at homes for meals and literary readings, endorse Indian customs including arranged marriage, and dialects of speech, as well as being enthusiastic hosts to visitors from their home country. They have access to Bollywood films quicker than Indians at home do, as the circulation of videos is one way they keep in touch with the visuals of the homeland.
Banal as this may seem, we have to understand, that investment in the home country is not just through emotional chords based on nostalgia, but on the very real questions of how tradition holds them tightly in its clutch. The real problems for the “Confused” in the next generation is how to segmentalise their feeling for their parents and grandparents, and to keep their friendship circles in a foreign country intact. This has been the stuff of many popular films, and Indians at home love to watch these films. The return home is premised on the understanding that the village to which people return for their scheduled holiday is the village of their dreams, it is a metaphorical space, not  just a geographical one, because it shifts to wherever the clan or lineage congregates to welcome them.
Among the St Thomas Christians of Kerala, too, their memory as genealogy is crafted in such a way that it extends, in printed pamphlets and handbooks, some times upto two thousand years. They have used this as a way to keep clan privileges intact, and though they may live abroad in United States of America, Europe, Australia or in The Gulf, Kudumbayogam is a very important part of their annual ceremonies. These meetings are held in homes, parish halls or hotels, and clan members assemble, and introduce one another to their progeny. Good food is eaten, hymns sung, news of marriage, birth or death announced. Facebook and Skype are very important institutions in the dissemination of information, and individuals and families return to their work places, replete with the memory of having met  with their own blood.  Every morning, before going to work, families living in Canada, Australia, Europe or America, converse, with their parents and relatives on the computer. The time difference is adjusted so that  family dinner, or early morning, when waking up, gathering the children for school, or tennis practise is a Skype moment. Certainly, new marriages are arranged through gossip and pointed or focussed information culled from meeting clansmen and women, whether digitally or through intermittent visits.
Many of these institutions are stabilised by the presence of the church, since people look to integrate their children in the same religious affiliation. The numbers of Overseas Indians are huge, running into millions, as we saw, and so the Church provides through its “ecclesiastical bureaucracy”, as Max Weber called it, the means of formally inducting new members into the church, by its lessons and its homilies, available on the net. Shalom TV is a very important ritual medium, and though it is Syrian Catholic, the diaspora, whether in Bengaluru or Boston, watches it irrespective of its organisational affiliation. Tithe paying is a very significant part of time honoured conventions, since without it, burial ground at the time of death cannot be accessible. Those who are concerned with finding brides or grooms for their young, use church validated e-portals, and with the blessings of the parishes, which are often far flung across many continents, they find a suitable partner for their children. This involves travelling abroad to finalise the match, but as with arranged marriages, the young too are complicit, believing that their parents will make the “best choice” for them. “You find me a bride, ma, I am too busy,” is an often announced request by young men in the fast moving laboratories of the technological and digital industry. The contract of marriage is based on the traditional notions of maintenance of the house, respect and protection of the elders, and birth and nurturing of children on the part of the wife as unspoken obligations which are based on social patterns of acceptable and honourable behaviour. In reality, the story may swing differently, when careers are prioritised over nurturing of young, or protection of old. The fertility rate goes down with industrialisation, and in Kerala, the average birth rate is 1.68 or less progeny, as the Diaspora have experienced industrial life styles, without necessarily migrating to them.
 Dowry and gifts of gold remain stable, and the young couple enters into marriage with parental support. Thirty years ago, in a study conducted by me, on behalf of the World Council of Churches,  (Kottayam, 1982) we found that all the women, without exception, believed that dowry was their right or avakasham. The Mary Roy case which won equal rights of inheritance, for children, regardless of gender was turned into a travesty, with the Church coming out strongly against it, since the tithes that came into parishes would be affected if stridhan became an anamoly, as they received lucre from both parties, as record of the transaction of marriage.(Visvanathan 1989, 1993) Property is one of the key issues that is stabilised through discussion and gossip, when Diaspora members return to their village. Daughters are still not expected to inherit property, and if they do, the men work very hard to wrest it back into the male line. (Thulaseedharan 2014) Daughters are expected to build their home, away from the village or land, where their brothers have their home. This distance however is mediated with close family ties of bilateral filiation, so that all festivals, anniversaries and life cycle events corroborate with the intensity of filial devotion to the parents, and the equalising of emotions. Daughters are expected to be present at all these events with their family, and no contestation  by them is expected, as their presence only communicates that love transcends rights to private property. Mannam or honour is the most privileged of sentiments. Filial obligations are  now gender neutral, and both men and women are expected to contribute to the well being of their parents, as the parents often contribute with money to their education, and the offsprings’ subsequent financial success is seen to be a reference point for monetary returns, helping to pay  medical bills, marriage of unmarried daughters, house repair and loans and old age maintenance.
The daughter’s absence during death, or funeral, is thought to be tragic, and the video industry now plays a large part in memorialisation, so that mortuary rituals are transmitted digitally as recordings. Who came for the funeral, the roll call of relatives, the lament of the artisans and servants associated with the family, the church and who officiated, the number of priests and bishops present,  tell us a great deal of the status of the family.
Mapping social relations through the statistics of visits, phone calls and skype conversations is an interesting way to think of the mind body relationship. Ghasan Hage presented the  JNU -ASA Firth lecture on 3rd April 2012, with the analyses of family gatherings across continents, with reference to the Lebanese living in Venezuela, Australia, USA, and Lebanon.(www.theasa)  
Territory transcends location, and digital technology brings about emotional closeness, though people may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. The idea of the “relative” as someone who is no longer primary kin, but is mediated by marriage relations, so that the family of orientation is secondary to the family of procreation, is juxtaposed with the real solidarity of kinship networks. The new mapping practises according to Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins (2009:3) is as follows
Mind                       Body
Absolute               Relative
Nomothetic         Ideographic
Ideological          Material
Subjective           Objective
Essence               Immanence
Static                   Becoming
Structure             Agency
Process              Form
Production        Consumption
Representation   Practice
Functional     Symbolic
Immutable       Fluid
Text                 Context
Map                 Territory

In a sense, what they point to is the way in which ideas hold within them, a certain reified grammar, but the actor is placed in the historical context in which he or she has to make decisions. So relationships would be represented through the imaginative abilities of actors, where emotions and desires are played out appropriately through their abilities, financial or cathartic. Dodge et al suggest that we read the map subjectively, and as narrative, through insights drawn from cultural practice, psychoanalyses and linguistics.
The map thus becomes known through the ability to be mobile. The idea of the extended family remains the desired ideal, but given stringent work obligations, men and women may be separated from each other for long periods of time, sometimes years, but they will remain in consonance with each other, through the medium of the aerogramme in the 80s of the last century, daily phone calls in the 90s, and as the financial remunerations increased, mobile phone and skype in the 21st century. Since sharing becomes visual and auditory, rather than tactile, the  interfamilial intimacy contributes to the immediacy of reception, and the emotions associated with them run in the same groove as if the family were indeed together.  Faith and family prayer mediate the systematic conditioning to occupational hazards, war zones, aeroplane landings and departures, and the general conviviality of meetings in limited time frames.
Jeremy W.Crompton in an essay in Dodge et al (2009) titled Rethinking Maps and Identity, suggests that we return to the Platonic version, of being, becoming, and the place of becoming, the chora, or ‘ontogenesis’. It is like fire, ever changing and without fixed properties, yet seems to have a ‘fiery character’. In this very place, truth is made, it is not static, but constantly evolving.
When we think of the Malayalis, who fled Quwait during the Gulf war in 1991, they represented the waiting, the suspense, the camps, the get away, as a narrative of survival. This is echoed in the conflicts in Libya, and in Iraq, where Malayalis were trapped in ongoing wars in the second decade of the 21st century, and duly reported in the press. They returned to the homeland, (Naad,) bereft of income, and then started new ventures, such as pineapple cultivation on hitherto fallow land, and lived off their  inherited or earned resources. When the war was over, they returned as migrants to the Gulf, because their life there had become a known entity, their children returned to school and life was normal again. However, they were always anxious, knowing that as temporary workers, they could never settle or really make it their home. In Saudi Arabia, they lived and worked under close surveillance, made fish curry with koddam pulli (indigenous tamarind, also called Kokum, dried and valued as a cultural legacy,) with bulbous organic red rice which they were traditionally accustomed to. They met in closed groups to pray in secret, formed close friendship groups,  and at the end of twenty years, returned to Kerala, with happy or unhappy memories of their working life, where  often the women were present too, as spouses, or kept hearth and home intact in Kerala. The stability of the family depended on these contracted arrangements, where women agreed to live apart for most of the year from their spouses. If  asked how they managed, and would say depreciatingly, “Veedu Ondullu”, meaning ‘There is a house’, but meaning the complex relationships encompassing the Family.
 Faith then becomes the cement, the intensity of which is compounded in formulaic prayer, expressed through the litanies of creed and bible readings. Men, who went without their families, and had to stay eight tenants in a room, would take turns cooking the food that they were used to in the village. The money they made was not spent, except for annual gifts that were taken back to the village. They paid mortgages, and dowries and education costs, so that from the  average ownership of two and a half acres of land, which was the coinage of  traditional belonging that they would not wish to sell, a new economy  of servitude/service to the family would emerge. The needs of the family, in an ever spiralling cycle of costs had to be met.
Mortuary rituals for relatives who died, while the members of the clan were elsewhere, or who had  actually died decades ago, became extremely important. Services and meals held in their memory assert the coming together of the clan. Family get together (kudumbayogam) on these occasions, with the traditional foods associated with the clan member such as cooked meats, tapioca, fish, payasam (rice cooked in milk and sugar and cloves) and unni appam (batter of rice powder, jaggery and bannanas, deep fried) end with the singing of hymns,  which had been sung during the person’s life time. This essentially brings together a collage of memories, of youth and the effervescence of believing, the aura of a return to the past, when the ancestors were alive.  Richard Fenn writes,
The sacred (the institutionalised Sacred) consists of a fragile set of symbolic defences that mimics the entire range of possibility with a substitute and counterfeit pantheon of possibilities. It offers a form of service that claims to be perfect freedom, and a form of renunciation that promises to give to the faithful the consummation of every desire. Thus, the sacred is a way of finding a safe place and time for the special graces, the charisma, of intimate, intense and enduring but evanescent and distant relationships. (Fenn 2001:6)
Gathering together with prayers and food, brings the dead close but in a harmonious way, not a malefic one. Where tombstones are no longer possible, because of population increase, the kin gather outside the vault, with the knowledge that the cement structures have been collectivised, and the dead anonymously, in aggregates, entropied by time and biological process.
 Richard Fenn suggests that the spiritual process of touring the past, and assimilating it, is essentially to accept that memories create a place inhabited by the living as much as the qualities imbued in the dead by the survivors. Remembering becomes not the harrowed space of violent or antagonistic relations, but  is characterised in terms of the strengths, including the motifs of allegiance and affection, not to speak of authority. (ibid 19)
The videography of the corpse, in Kerala, is one of the most macabre aspects of visual mummification, as the dead then enters into a space of continuous presence. The funeral becomes a transglobal phenomenon, as the living, where ever they are, may now participate in the prayers for the soul. The presence of the dead is given a corporeal and ever present immanence, and the bright lights of the video camera then record the emotions of the mourners in the indefinable space of an eternity which immortalises the deceased and mourners. As memory codes, the peacefulness of the visage, or the utter and total disfigurement is a testimony to the struggle against death.
When Ramana Maharishi died, his corpse was photographed by the eminent French photographer Cartier Bresson. This collection is with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. People came from all over the world and India, to have darshan of the Sage, and the return to view Maharishi was in a way the recreation of his life, which was observed visually as a meteor that crossed the sky at 8.47 pm on 14th April 1950, the time of death. People saw this meteor in other parts of India, and the next day, the news of his death was confirmed.  Fenn writes,“Religious language possesses the capacity to embody possibilities excluded from social discourse and from the conventional imagination. Not merely to point to that possibility, but to embody it, that is the core of religious speech.”(ibid 27)
In contrast to the pilgrims, coming from many parts of India and the world, who sacralise by their continuous involvement, the life of the sage, are the children of the old, who visit them in Old Age homes. There is a great deal of mutual embarrassment,  as love predominates over negligence, and yet, co-terminously there is a utilitarian sense of time and obligation to the work world, which both recognise. Old Age Homes are Kerala’s gift to the rational soul who knows that his or her obligations are to the next generation who have to be educated and fed. The loneliness of the old is circumvented in collective activities, where prayer, music, sociability, autonomy are all seen to be values in themselves. Often crèches are run in the premises of the Old Age Home, as this provides for the mutual pleasure of interaction, which Radcliffe Browne, as every undergraduate Sociology student knows, called “the merging of alternate generations”. Phone calls from children and grandchildren become the high point of interaction because there is information that is exchanged on both sides. When senility falls like a shadow, the institution knows how to handle it with the help of specialised staff, and the offspring are protected from the humiliation of being absent, and seemingly non-caring.
The pilgrim, the tourist, the countryman who is privileged to  return home are co-incident. They bring with them the exhaustion and the joys of their working lives. They communicate on their return that this is a holiday which is won. They work very hard to please the family, to make long journeys to spend an hour or two with distant kin, to attend betrothals, marriages, baptisms and death rituals. Their success, financially and experientially is a sign of their honour. They left the homeland because there was no avenue of employment, but having made good, the trip home annually or less frequently, is an embellishment of love of family and country. Martin Buber suggests that beyond the cult of the individual, the monolith of The State or of Collectivities, is “relationship” as the total social good. How is this made possible, how is dialogue the virtue of those who wish to remain connected? He describes it as anguish and expectation, as the context in which all religions maintain not a uniformity, but a specificity.   Dialogue is not traffic, it is relationship. (Buber 1992: 47)

Accordingly, even if speech and communication may be dispensed with, the life of dialogue seems, from what we may perceive, to have inextricably joined to it, as it’s minimum constitution, one thing, the mutuality of inner action. Two humans bond together in dialogue must obviously be turned to one another, they must, therefore – no matter with what measure of activity or indeed of consciousness of activity – have turned to one another. (ibid 47)
It is this tuning into one another that allows for the intimacy of the return, the ability to forgive and forget, the realisation that the homecoming is always painful and yet liberating. Love transcends class differences, and the return to poverty, or at least frugality is made evanescent in the exchange of confidences, the sharing of mutual sorrows and joys, and the exchange of consumer items such as foreign soap and shampoos or perfumes and colognes, for jasmine flowers, yams and home reared  goat meat, chicken or duck eggs, fresh water fish from the nearest river, and jackfruit chips, or mangos and bananas from the yard, all seen to be novelties that the home country still provides, including eating on banana leaves.
It is the meal as a cultural signature of community life that has it’s greatest significance.  In Kerala, as there is no ban, beef is served, (fried  with coconut slices,) but is called Poth (ox) or kalla, (bullock)  as India becomes more self conscious about cow totemism. The diaspora are used to eating hamburgers  and steaks unselfconsciously, in cafes or at home, and the political connotations of this with regard to specialised forms of  bovine totemism in several parts of the home country quite escapes them. Where there are bans, the diaspora eat from cold storage what is available and permitted. Certainly that export of beef occurs is a well known fact, and sometimes the beef exporters live in a village where people remember them for their initial poverty, and then the palatial house they were able to build with their new wealth. Ban on beef in India means increased export to the West. There is no social taboo to eating beef, since in Kerala, it is not the cow belt politics that pervade north India, and for Malayalis there is no taboo, unless self imposed, through systematic Sanskritisation by the RSS, or because of  traditional  Hindu upper caste affiliation. In North Malabar, Christians eat pork to differentiate themselves from Muslims. The idea that what one eats is one’s own business is a very dominant position taken in Kerala vis a vis ritual taboos, probably because of a century of the anti Brahman, Self Respect Movements, and Marxism.
That  Diaspora, when abroad, eat the best produce, exported from India, from the fisheries  or mango orchards. When they return, they find that with their remuneration, they are able to afford expensive sea fish, or fruit, but their neighbours cannot.  Often religion becomes a divisive force, when lower income groups, on their return from the Gulf, can afford expensive food, and upper castes who have remained in salaried jobs in the home state cannot afford the same. Alcohol consumption rose so substantially that in 2015, the Kerala government banned liquor in the toddy shops and the government retail stores, but permitted hoteliers and tourists to stock alcohol. This led to a public outcry, and the Malayalis who had become addicted  to liquor found  vendors setting up stalls at the Coimbatore border. Fried beef and arrack were the common man’s staple, and the shutting down of the indigenous pubs created a hue and cry. Dilip Menon had argued that the Tiyyas were politically powerful in the 19th century because of their ability to provide alcohol to the Nairs for their temple rituals, where libations of toddy was an oblation. However, the use of toddy was in fact a time honoured beverage, included in cooking even in Syrian Christian domestic use for pancakes, and could still be procured from the Ezhava community, on request, since every family had a toddy tapper bring down their coconuts according to domestic need or for sale. The real abuse came from the sale of hard liquor, and since the Kerala government was receiving crores in excise duty, the  recent ban did not come into place till the rates of suicide, rape and murder were too high to ignore.
The cleavage between Hindus, Christians and Muslims became increasingly evident in the 21st century. Since the sensibilities were further aroused by the ideological provocations of political parties, and religious communalism, the loud speaker became a site of continuous contestation, and small towns were riddled with noise pollution from the churches, temples and mosques, all expressing their right to profess their religious beliefs equally at the same time.
Maurice Blanchot writes
The Book always indicates an order that submits to unity, a system of notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of thought over language, and the promise of communication that would one day be immediate and transparent. Now it may be that writing requires the abandonment of all those principles, that is to say, the end and also the coming to completion of everything that guarantees one culture – not so that we might in idyllic fashion turn back, but rather so we might go beyond, that is, to the limit, in order to break the circle, the circle of circles; the totality of the concepts that found history, that develops in history, and whose development history is. Included in all this are events, lapses, and interruptions: death itself. ( Blanchot 1993:xii)
Once the Book closes on itself, each religious community then defines its boundaries, excluding those who will not accept its totalising dictates. The Syrian Catholics in Kerala began to have  prayer camps which were magnetising in their power to ‘charismatically’ draw in large numbers. The Mar Thoma Church had its Maramon Convention, which innovated with music, and drew in international gospel evangelists. The Pentecostal Church drew in larger and larger numbers from all affiliations, since it offered miraculous cures, and catharsis as the total experience uniting all members. The Muslims began to go on Hajj, thus creating a hierarchy among themselves of those who could attain this life changing ascent to Mount Arafat, and the circumambulation of the tomb of Mohammad the Prophet, and those who could not pay the  travel agent for such a trip. The Hindus, namely the Nairs, returned to their traditional Martial rituals and arts, representing the cult of self defence not just as aesthetics, but also as war fare. The Ezhavas dominated Marxist politics, and the Dalits began to organise themselves to counter Brahmin hegemony. The Brahmins felt increasingly marginalised, and either departed to foreign lands, including metropolitan cities in India, or became professionally displaced.
 The pilgrim to Sabarimala created new osmotic boundaries between caste, class, gender, region and physical ability to enter a sacralised space, crowded beyond measure. The new dispensation was to the forming of new rules of conduct which became binding on those who belonged to any specific association.  People just became used to the atrophy of dialogue as neighbourhood and family practise. These became codes of conduct, which were articulated publicly, and found their permanence in inscription. Any move towards flexibility and syncretism was frowned upon.
For the Diaspora, Work was panacea, but the high turnover at the work place because of recession meant that families quite often lived in different continents, and women were often overqualified at the workplace as cashiers and school teachers when they had been educated as engineers or doctors or academics in the home country. Siblings too settled in other countries, and so people travelled in various directions, because they could afford it, to meet their kin.
One of the interesting aspects of globalisation has been the need that the Diaspora has for magnificence in the site of home and place of worship back home. When they return to the village of their forefathers, they immediately constructed huge houses, larger than the neighbours. Inside they maintain much the same level of comfort or discomfort, as they knew previously. The electricity routinely goes off in the monsoon, which because of climate change extends much beyond the Harvest festival of Onnam. These mammoth houses are constructed ostentatiously, as the nouveau riche see the need to exhibit carpets and chandeliers brought back from the Emirates, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, or Oman. They like to communicate that they are different from the Malayali, who has not had the Gulf experience, and so vivid colours are used in painting the exteriors. However, when it comes to agricultural work, the NRI or Overseas Indian is perfectly capable of setting up a haystack with childhood friends, or sharing in ritual offices in the local parish.  Since many return when they are in their early fifties, they take up honorary occupations as principals of trust colleges and schools, or work in any capacity available to them. They enjoy meeting their former colleagues in get togethers which are titled Gulf Employees, or they write their memoirs and read newspapers. In places like Kuruvillangad, or Ranni, the elite have transformed their  hitherto obscure villages by duplicating South of France villas. The demand for a privately constructed airport has been vociferous in the Chenganoor area, as the  numbers of Gulf returnees are huge.  In one village ten kms from the town, all three hundred and fifty families, had members who worked in a Gulf country. In Cochin, the large number of flats which have surfaced are establishments, mostly unoccupied, as the rentier class of Syrian Christians living in the Gulf or Australia or Europe or America, built them, but they do not live in them, nor is ready to rent them out. Absentee landlordism takes a new avatar.
 Near Chenganoor, the Gulf returned are so many, that they have demolished an ancient Church and produced a huge and stunning edifice. Parumalla Tirumeni was the humblest and purest of souls, a Saint  recognised by all, and his living quarters are still preserved, his  actual room the size of a large dining table! Yet, the miracle church associated with him has been turned into a massive cathedral, such as the medieval churches of Europe, built from the loot of war. This church however, built with Gulf remittances has  modern abstract art glass windows, and three eucharist celebrations occurring  on simultaneous altars, at which three different priests preside. The influx of the faithful is so large, that the size of the church is a matter of pride for the residents of the hamlet. However archaeologists and sensitive laity are aghast. As one of them, Fr Iganatious Payappilly, a well known archivist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru said to me, in October 2013, “I wrote to the Parish priests of several places, saying that Tippu Sultan did less damage than people like you. He only took off the thatched roofs of ancient churches but you have totally demolished them.”
In an email to me,  dated 22nd June 2015, Dr M.P Joseph (IAS) responded to my concern over the confabulation of images and expansion of churches,
The Cardinal Alencherry, Head of the Syro Malabar Church has now advised all parishes that they must avoid ostentation in the building of churches. He has also made it mandatory for the Cardinal’s Office to approve designs of new churches to be built. And more pertinently, there is a growing appreciation among the laity for the need to preserve these old churches and their beautiful architecture, however innocently they may have put motifs of the Swastika or the Eye or whatever.
 A letter to a cardinal in Kerala about the ostentations of the church  went viral on Facebook, and is reproduced here. It may be remembered that the concern about new art is often open to interpretation. A Times of India journalist   Annu Thomas wrote to me on June 11 2015,  to ask if the eye depicted in the wall art in the  church, or the swastika was a sign of the devil, to which query Ignatius Payappilly and  Hormis Tharakan (IPS) replied  to me, that it would be creating misunderstanding between religious communities if such a view was taken. The idea that shared symbolism might in fact lead to communalism and misinterpretation was a very real fear. The contemporary data on exaggerated renovation as representing the vested interest of the Diaspora in affirming it’s piety in the home country is interesting primarily because of the traditional syncretistic motifs of Hindu Christian art, as ancient crosses, temple walls, peacock motifs which have been presented in the first chapter of my book, The Christians of Kerala (1993) as that  aspect, where in the contexts of architecture and symbols, the osmosis between religions is notable, its legitimacy authorised through assimilation into dominant Hindu motifs,when Christianity in Kerala had royal patronage.
In Palakkad, the temple dedicated to Siva called Kalpathy Viswanathaswamy has a long history of renovations, since this takes place routinely according to the prescribed temple calendar. However, when Indira Nooyi became President of the Pepsi cola company, her  mother who was  originally from the Kalpathy village, dedicated a meditation chamber in thanksgiving, as her own father, Justice Narayanswamy was from Kalpathy. As renovation  had proceeded on a grandscale,  according to the desires of the local community, based on their donations, the wooden pillars in the temple were substituted by stainless steel pillars, and the archaeologically significant pillar thought to be an emblem of the 14th century king, Raja Ittycheryan, was polished, and the inscription removed. The Tamil Brahmins of Kalpathy are an upwardly mobile community and for them the modern is the epitome of the present. The past is legend, it is necessary as a bulwark to their present circumstance, but the present is sacred.  People return from all parts of India to initiate their new-borns, to conduct mortuary rituals, to be present at the annual Rath festival, and ofcourse to hear the musicians from all over South India, who perform on the invitation of the trustees of the Kalpathy Viswanathswamy temple. There is really nothing old according to this view, in that sense, because the new must presents itself  in keeping with the needs of the believers. Archaeologists, of course, feel differently.  Heritage thus becomes a loaded term, with people contesting the State and the requirements of the Tourist industry, which was clamouring for the old and the traditional. However, there are critics, and they are often influential, as the following letter shows, for St Thomas Christians, who often feel their voice has been taken away from them arbitrarily in the market place of the church. The call to frugality comes at a time, when Kerala is rapidly changing its traditional rural urban continuum, and tourism and  Diaspora are looking for highways to turn the State into a site of continuous hedonistic visuality, be it IPL games, a la Shashi Tharoor, or monstrous shopping arcades and magnificent sites of worship. Places where the Techno Parks have come up, have promoted the Laboratory as being less polluting than the Factory, but, in truth, the needs of the cereberal workers are such that owning  several cars, and shopping brings with it a huge cost on the delicate ecology of the State. Building large churches on paddy fields has brought about the distinctly dangerous phenomenon of sinking floors, and parishioners have to carefully skirt the ragged construction and repair works as they come to pray and sing. The response has been to ban construction on paddy fields, and to call on parishioners to be more circumspect in their architectural renovations.
Such a letter clearly comes from a powerful member of the laity, whose family has a strong history of honours and obligations to the church, whose very past is retold through print, general opinion, and rumour to record its special place. The Tharakan family history has been recently published  as Profiles of the Parayil Tharakans, Glimpses of the History of a Family, a Region, and A Church, written and collated by  P.K.M Tharakan, who lives in Belgium, and the work is replete with genealogies and photographs of family mansions, housing not just eminent kinsmen, church honours, brave actions, but also the material culture that accompanied them.  As Medievel pepper merchants, they became immensely famous for their cosmopolitan ability to deal with the Portuguese and the British colonists, during the period of the commercial revolution. They were the keepers of the Varthamanampustukam, the first travelogue, which communicated that the Malayalis, even when Christians, referred to themselves as Intugal, or Indians and wanted more than anything ecclesiastical jurisdiction to be placed with Indian priests and prelates. (Visvanathan 1995 (Interview with  Ambassador A.K. Damodaran, IFS,) Maleykandathil  2013).
Interestingly, with tourism, family mansions become the site of bed and breakfast arrangements, as the beauty of these 18th century houses is memorable, and well maintained. The Diaspora return to boat rides on backwaters in Kuttunad, eating the traditional fare of the Malayalis, and at the same time, savouring the sense of being an elite that has the best of both worlds. The lives of artisans and the working class, such as shop employees, or professionals such as nurses, working in the Gulf, as has been pointed out by Prema Kurien, in Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity is marked by a certain conspicuous consumption. This has much to do with the way in which we think of subsistence economies, where the remuneration is such that it cannot always be defined as stable or permanent. Here and now is sufficient, because of tomorrow nothing is known.
In the case of  Kalpathy, Palakkad, we have a genealogical tradition which goes back to the 14th century, where a King, patronised a widow, Lakshmi Ammal, and built a temple for her. She had been to Benaras with her husband’s ashes to be interred in the Ganga, and returned  from there with a lingam. This was installed on the banks of the Kalpathy river, a tributary of the Neelam. Steps were built, in emulation of the ghats of Benaras, and this temple, the Viswanathswamy temple, became the site of mortuary rituals, for those who could not afford to go to Benaras.
The Smartha Brahmins (Iyers) had been invited by the Palakkad king, migrants from drought prone areas, around Tanjore and Chidambaram, and settled in 18 villages in Palakkad. The Raja was wrathful to the Namboodris who refused to serve him, since he had a liason with a tribal woman, whom he wished to marry, and  so the drought affected Tamil Brahmans took their place on invitation. The Kalpathy Iyers, descendants of the migrants from Mayiladathurai, became very well known in the early 20th century, for the remittances they made to their families from the Presidency towns of colonial India, as service providers, clerks and administrators, to the British government. The rich traditions of the Brahmans had been preserved through their culture of food, architecture, temple rituals, mathematics and music. Milton Singer, has very well described the segmentalisation of home and workplace in his classic work, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, (1972) and so have C.J. Fuller and Harpriya Narasimha, in their recent study, Tamil Brahmans (2015). The latter authors assiduously describe how third and fourth generation mobile Brahmans from Tamil Nadu were able to assimilate into the West, as soft ware engineers, and in the cosmopolitan cultures of the big cities of Modern India, such as Chennai. However, as a community, they always communicated total loyalty to their traditions,  and were able to express solidarity through their loyalty to their village, small town or city, through  participation in temples, and domestic rituals, including their renovation and management.  A new and non Brahman resident in Kalpathy, a collector of antiques, reported to me that downward mobility is frequent, and that the Brahmans are going through a decline, which happens to many communities during historical periods. They have lost traditional occupations and skills, and have become auto drivers, shop keepers and labourers. (interview 28th June 2009)
Preservation of culture is not limited to buildings, it is about vedic culture, about music, mathematics and knowledge,  specifically Sanskrit, according to another informant. The Tamil Brahmins in Kalpathy remain “migrants” in Kerala, though they have been here for centuries. In September 2013, in Palakkad, they have asked for minority status and privileges, including reservation.
Joan Punzo Waghorn in the Diaspora of the Gods  (2004) defined the specific ways in which the mapping of the temple, mosque and church in the  Mylapore Luz area was a representation of the syncretic nature of religious persuasion in a historical framework. The Tamil Brahmins came in to do their shopping,  alongside with visiting the Gods, including the purchase of necessary silk sarees for festivals and rites of passage, and so the juxtaposition of market place and religious sites were indeed very visible. The Diaspora is conversant with the best places to shop for the traditional items needed for pujas, and they take back to America the appalams, the sambar powders  etc, which they may equally find in the Indian stores in their work places. Diaspora of the Gods describes the duplication of ritual sites in cities abroad, so that people will feel comfortable far away from home. Equally, in temple and mutt pathshalas, young Brahman boys are trained to carry out their responsibilities as temple priests in far off countries.
The ability to represent the cults of Hinduism as sites of ritual transfer is well known. Americans have invested in the Hare Rama Krishna movement for decades, and the skill of the orators of other cult representatives of Hinduism is the new machinery of conversion.  At  street corners in Boston, one meets  white devotees of some Hindu cult or another selling copies of the Ramayana or Mahabharata. In Santa Cruz, California, a quiet sanctuary exists for those who are drawn into the meditational practises of Sri Ramanasramam, but the temple aspect, the iconography and the representation of the Gods in a traditional place of worship is well accentuated. The integration across race, caste and religious lines is clearly established. Whereas, previously, Hinduism represented itself as an exclusive religion of ascription,  one had to be born a Hindu, the globalised world has communicated its need to be absorbed in Indic practise, whether Hindu or Buddhist. In Santa Fe, the Sikhs have established a cultic rendezvous, well entrenched in the post modern practises of finding a comfort zone, where ever one may. It is no longer necessary to be Indian, to fit into the kaleidoscopic religious ferment. This is in stark contrast to the idea of endogamy and religious community discussed previously. It may be noted that in the urban metropolis the move to homogenisation is strongly resisted by the youth, who see the senseless killings in the name of religion as abuse of faith. Right through the 90s, the middle class urban youth expressed great interest in religion, communicating that all the Gods were interesting to them, visiting pilgrimage sites as devotees. Sacred Heart Cathedral in Delhi, juxtaposed with the neighbouring Sikh Gurudwara, the Hanuman temple on Baba Khadak Singh Marg, and Nizamuddin Chisti’s dargah just 8 kms distant from the city centre, all had the sense of thronging crowds and the vibrancy of accompanying markets, where amulets, sacred pictures, holy water and food are available along with prayers for blessing, cures and favours. In contrast, the lumpen proletariat and the avaricious, so-called ‘faceless mob’ is always marshalled by politicians to murder and desecrate across religious lines. Is there a justification for mass murder? Those who engage with it ascribe to themselves martial status, and deny citizenship rights to others.
The choice of faith and acceptance with respect for all religions is the most interesting aspect of Indian secularism. Clearly, these young people were very different from the fanatics of each religion who had closed the gates of their faiths to the other. Terrorism, which Indians had been familiar with for decades, and struck fear in every heart was the ugly face of fanaticism, and communalism was equally rampant. Festival, fair, carnival and trade that integrates communities, went against riots and pogroms and the easy dealing of death by those who carried the cards of violence. (Visvanathan 2012)
The Diaspora often returned even during days of riots and violence, because of their commitment to families and neighbourhoods. What we need to understand is that while war, espionage and terrorism are every day events, the normal world revolves around the ability to carry out mundane tasks.

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