Thanjavur, where we were doing field research, is called something to the effect of “Temple Town, Tamil Nadu,” AKA the only big thing that is there is this huge Hindu temple built in the 1200’s. The thing is massive, and you can see the top of it all the time when you arrive on the train, and while going on wild rickshaw rides through poorly laid out streets to this school, or that bank. It is the only reason that any tourists come to Thanjavur, and tourists do come to Thanjavur. We had been in the city for about 10 days and still had not gone. We had two more days.
The decision was made that we would save some money (what worked out to be maybe $2.50 between the 7 of us who were going, but which sounds much more substantial when it is phrased as 150 rupees) by taking the bus. So we got on one that would take us near the temple, and rode around. For about an hour. This was a big bus, one of the articulated ones that remind me of a caterpillar, and we were going down tiny streets. I think I could have touched buildings or stolen from the displays of shops through the window. Eventually we reached a bend in the street that the bus just stopped, some Tamil way yelled from the front, and everyone started unloading. In the middle of some random residential area. I came to the conclusion that this was not the bus’ normal route. We walked the rest of the way to the bus stand.
We realized why we had been sent on such a twisted path—detours to avoid the motorcade route. The chief minister—equivalent to a Governor—was in town. Equivalent in many ways, actually, for the Californians at least. The current Minister was a retired actor.
There were men everywhere at the bus station, in their best white shirts and either pants or the skirt-like cloth wrapped around the waste and kilted up between the legs. The were everywhere. Filling the streets, streams of men in both directions, near impossible to navigate or oppose. We tried to wade through, but Shulpa was getting nervous.
“They are here to see the Chief Minister. And after he speaks, they will start drinking.” An aside that will make this make more sense: we have noticed that to most of the relatively high class and socially sheltered IFMR employees, anyone who drinks at all is an alcoholic. It is pretty entertaining at the office, because a good number of the employees are either from the west or schooled there, and they talk about partying in a veiled way, making sure they know who is listening. Microcosm of the clash of cultures that is going on here. Apparently as recently as three years ago self appointed moral police would go into the legal hotel bars (closed at 11!) and cause a ruckus if men and women were dancing to closely. One of the top bars was apparently shut down because a married couple was found kissing.
Aside aside, Shulpa was worried about all the drunks, and wanted to go back. It was getting dark anyways, so there would not be much to see at the temple, so the girls decided to go back with her. Robert and I decided to stay. The prospect of unruly crowds, a drunken political Indian populace, and some foreign street theatre was too good to pass up.
We were at an arbitrary street corner. There were wooden structures up, displaying huge posters easily 40 feet into the air. And this isn’t the kind of wood you can buy at Home Depot—we’re talking glorified sticks with the bark stripped off lashed together with cheap rope. Those men brave, or drunk, enough and looking for a better view climbed up the open structures and peered out at the commotion below from behind the oversized face of their state leader. These structures lined the street for quite a ways, and we were at just an arbitrary stretch of it, but by my count I could see around 6000 people from our vantage point sitting up atop a wall that separated the street from a school’s grounds behind.
Groups in young men in special uniforms strutted through the crowd, proud roosters in the party’s red back and yellow, waving flags bearing a rising sun graphic in the air. Soldiers kept order, and there were a lot of them. All over the place. Constantly moving, as vans unloaded a group here, then picked up some of the others, moved them to some other locations, then another group came running from a different end of the street, and they were all the while trying to clear a path for the motorcade that was soon coming. Holding back enthusiastic mobs behind a rope, occasionally spotting a troublemaker and berating him with unfulfilled threats of violence. It felt vaguely fascist. This impression was probably not aided by the fact that some of the banners had swastikas on them.
Both Robert and I had full liters of water. The men sitting next to us asked for a drink, and our bottles were soon passed around without any further consent from us, returned when finally empty. Not exactly what I had been expected.
People kept on noticing the whiteys in the midst of all this Indian chaos, and waving. It felt funny, with all of the pomp and so many people waving at me, I felt like I should be giving a speech.
Eventually the street was sufficiently cleared, an hour after the chief minister was supposed to come by. He got into a car, as we could see from the giant screens that would end up showing the speech to those gathered in the streets, and drove by. To me that was it. His car passed, followed by a long stream of what I can only assume of other officials’ cars. The crowd went wild. It was strange to see—we weren’t anywhere near the epicenter of the event, and yet we could certainly feel these people’s earth moving. We found out later that this happens once a year, and that the villagers come into town for that one night and live it up. The one interesting thing that happens in the year.
Robert and I left after the motorcade passed, having no desire to watch a man we didn’t know give a speech on a screen of dubious quality in a language we didn’t understand. Went and got parota (like naan, but more filling and moist) from a dodgy hole in the wall restaurant. Definitely one of those places they tell you not to eat if you don’t want to get sick. By far the best we have had yet. Major points to Abha Dascupta, who told me that the tastiness of the food I got here would be directly proportional to the sketchiness of the eating establishment, a theorem which my observations have generally supported.
We decided to check out the debaucherous drinking that, according to the Tamil Nadu government on the labels of any kind of alcohol “destroys country, family, and life.” I feel like their surgeon general is taking liberties. We hung out around one of the wine shops for a while, watched men returning from the festivities exchanging tattered bills for warm beers, or harder stuff. We asked a smaller, older man if he liked beer. He shook his head, grinned at us with his remaining teeth, reached into the crotch of his pants and fished out a fifth of whiskey. Or, more accurately, half of a fifth of whiskey. We engaged in a philosophical discussion. We wondered about the stairs just to the right of the wine shop, which led to a mysterious upper floor. Alcohol-bearing men were constantly streaming up and down the stairs.
Returned to our part of town, and decided to grab a beer at the local wine shop, considerably quieter and out of the rush of activity that engulfed the middle of town. Met some students from Sastra, one of the universities that we had been researching, and had some very different conversations with them than we had had while interviewing students about their education financing. Eventually they said that it was getting late for them, and that they had to go. It was 10 o’clock. It was OK, the bar was closing anyways.
It was a fascinating experience. So much more real than anything else that I’ve seen here. There was only one other foreigner there. More importantly, we were there for more or less the same reason everyone else was. It wasn’t us observing and studying them, or at least not any more than they were observing each other. We were all there for the spectacle, and it was honest. I sat, uncomfortable on a cinderblock wall painted with political graffiti, and waited for a politician to briefly drive by. I did that, and do did thousands of other people, whose lives would in all probability intersect just that once with mine.
The next day was our last in Thanjavur. First thing we did was get into a rickshaw, not the bus, and pay that $2.50 premium to get taken right to the temple. So we made it after all, at the last possible minute. There were ancient, intricate stone carvings. There was an elephant. We left for the city that night.
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