Cycling India’s Wildest Highway: Paradise is Stinky
Travel Stories: In which Jeffrey Tayler pedals more than 1,000 miles along the Grand Trunk Road. Part three of five: To the Taj Mahal.
02.25.09 | 10:20 AM ET
REUTERS/Jayanta ShawFrom Delhi I headed south down the Sher Shah branch of the Grand Trunk Road, into Uttar Pradesh state. Just past Hodal, as the sun crested a jungle horizon over fields of corn and onions, I rolled out of my hotel’s grassy grounds onto the GTR, now a divided, four-lane tarmac in decent repair, with much less traffic. Gone were the chilly dawns of the Punjabi highlands. Here the Gangetic Plain spread before me, warm and humid, bathed in mists from the Yamuna and Ganges, unseen, but growing closer, my map told me. From spired Hindu temples echoed hymns in Sanskrit, setting the countryside alive with sacred verse. I was finally adjusting to my expedition; my fatigue was lessening, my soreness fading.
But the pain of Indians along my way showed no sign of abating; Uttar Pradesh is one of the poorest and most backward states in the country. Crews of turbaned Biharis, emaciated and sun-blackened, labored by the side of the GTR, digging ditches and breaking rocks, overseen by paunchy masters laughing into their cell phones while reclining in wicker chairs under umbrellas. Dalit women with despairing eyes treaded the highway, scavenging for metal in putrid rubbish. In the world’s largest democracy, despite reform movements and protective legislation, one-sixth of the population remains (especially in rural areas), as in bygone ages, largely “untouchable.” Along the GTR, the Bhagavad Gita’s admonition, “Mixture (of caste) leads to naught but hell,” still obtains.
MORE ON INDIA’S WILDEST HIGHWAY: Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five | Video: Jeffrey Tayler on Cycling Across India | Video: Jeffrey Tayler: ‘I Was Getting in Over My Head’ | Video: Jeffrey Tayler on Why He Started Traveling | Video: Jeffrey Tayler on His New Book, ‘Murderers in Mausoleums’ | Slideshow: Bicyclists in India
Four days later, while bumping down Agra’s riverside embankment road with my bike’s chain chinking ominously and its gears gnashing, I marveled at a quasi-celestial vision dominating a curve in the silty green Yamuna: smog, crayoned pink and orange by the waning sun, was garlanding the dewdrop domes and gem-embellished minarets of the Taj Mahal, the world’s most gorgeous mausoleum. Close up, however, by the monument’s gates, the Taj’s aura vanished amid cow farts and sales spiels. Under the kindly gaze of Brahman cattle, a crew of buck-toothed touts, banshee-eyed postcard peddlers and pretzel-legged mendicants scrimmaged to accost every tourist arriving, Indian or foreign. I pushed my way through the ruckus, paid a pestering huckster to help me jump a seething, quarter-mile-long queue held in check by baton-brandishing guards, and found myself on the paradisiacal grounds of the Taj. (If I hadn’t arrived so late, I wouldn’t have considered cheating.)
Paradise turned out to be rather stinky. Shoes had to be left at the steps, so hundreds of bare-toed visitors thronged over the Taj’s esplanade, imbuing the breeze with a pungent footy aroma. Nevertheless, I stood in awe of Moghul India’s emblematic architectural masterpiece, which was commissioned by Shah Jahan in the 17th century to house the tomb of Mumtaz, his beloved wife. It took 20,000 workers 20 years to complete the structure, the on-site viewing of which exceeds even expectations heightened by all the guidebook photos and postcard images that most tourists absorb long before arriving. Now at dusk rosy light illumined the Taj’s feminine marble curves, inlaid with precious stones and graced with Quranic inscriptions. Devastated as he may have been by Mumtaz’s death, Shah Jahan expired not from grief but from the raucous rounds of opium-abuse and sex in which he indulged after losing his throne to his usurping son.
Hankering after fresh air, I walked over to the esplanade’s edge. There I squinted and focused on the Taj, and succeeded, for an instant, in shutting out the crowds and seeing it as did the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore—as a “tear on the face of eternity.”
On the miry banks of the sacred Yamuna River, in the tumbledown town of Mathura, Hindus hold that Lord Krishna was born, chubby and comely, blue as beryl, apt at antics and heroically inclined. Once settled into a hotel, I hired a wiry and affable quinquagenarian sporting a Mister Softee turban to transport me in his cycle rickshaw over hilly lanes to the temple complex built atop the Shri Krishna Janmasthan (Birthplace of Lord Krishna). Astride the entrance gates towered two 30-foot statues of spear-wielding warriors decked out in armor from the time of the Bhagavad Gita, setting an intimidating martial ambience; between them, Krishna in effigy lashed his chariot’s horses to battle; and, at ground level, a gang of snarling, pink-assed monkeys hustled pedestrians for handouts.
I passed beneath the warriors and through a metal detector, and underwent two pat-downs verging on the obscene from uniformed guards. On the grounds ahead, among clutches of tilak-daubed worshippers, patrolled soldiers shod in khaki slippers, with their automatic rifles at the ready. Only the silvery gray Brahman cows, lazing about with their humps flopping on their ridged backs, looked relaxed.
Krishna, who proclaimed salvation to be achievable in this life, without mortification of the flesh, enjoys wide popularity in India. So why all the uptight guards?
My graybearded guide, Brij, explained. “De birtplace of Shri Krishna is here, almost under de Id Gah Mosque,” he told me, droopy-eyed, pointing a crooked forefinger at minarets and domes separated from the temple by a barbed-wire fence. Relations between Hindus and Muslims in India sometimes erupt into violence, especially since, here as elsewhere on the subcontinent, shrines of competing faiths have at various times occupied the same patches of earth. Muslims had first destroyed this temple in 1017.
Brij presented the mien of a professor emeritus and dressed accordingly (patched sports jacket, frayed cardigan, wrinkled chinos). He spoke grammatically sound English, which didn’t mean I could understand a word he said, at least without asking him to repeat himself. His tongue flapped between sparse stalagmite teeth, turning familiar words into blub-blub approximations or puzzling doggerel. It soon hardly mattered, though. He led me through a hall where an idol of Krishna, wreathed in flowers, more chartreuse-skinned than blue, his curly locks thick and black, sat on a silver-brocaded carpet, beaming beatifically beneath a painting of a parrot-filled tree. I found all the colors beautiful, but I declined a priest’s offer to tilak me, though I ceded to his request for a donation of a few rupees.
We then descended into a subterranean corridor and emerged into a grotto shrine. Sanskrit and Hindi inscriptions decorated the walls around a slab of reddish rock—the god’s birthstone—overlooked by paintings depicting him in childhood as blue-skinned and rosebud-lipped, plump and playful. Votaries surged in, crowding past us, murmuring Hari Krishna! Hari Krishna!, touching their fingers to the rock and then to their foreheads; some kneeled and chanted; the eyes of a few went blissfully lachrymose. Brij and I ended our tour out by a sylvan mock-up of Govardhan Hill, where, beneath pipal trees and palms, water buffaloes, deer, monkeys and peacocks, cast in shiny plastic, had gathered, statically enchanted, to hear a mannequin of Krishna playing the flute.
Brij went on to tell me of Krishna’s slaying of the evil king Kamsa and other exploits. I would have dismissed it as pure fancy, save for the look of mellow piety in Brij’s aged and watering eyes.
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Yahoo! BuzzJeffrey Tayler is a contributing editor for The Atlantic and the author of six books, including River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny. His latest is Murderers in Mausoleums. His second book "Facing the Congo"
james conway 02.25.09 | 2:12 PM ET
Two points: 1. Your writing seems to reflect more than a trace of racism. 2. There are no /mister Softee drivers that wear turbans.
James Conway - Vice Preident
Mister Softee Inc.
Eva Holland 02.25.09 | 3:07 PM ET
1. I didn’t detect any traces of racism in this piece or the earlier ones.
2. I don’t think the author was suggesting that the man was a Mister Softee employee.
I’ve been loving this series! I’ve never traveled any part of the GTR myself, but Kipling’s “river of life” description has always stayed with me. Thanks.
Ankur Agarwal 02.26.09 | 10:05 AM ET
The series only strikes me for two reasons:
(1) the amount of venal racism
Just one of the samples: “His tongue flapped between sparse stalagmite teeth, turning familiar words into blub-blub approximations or puzzling doggerel.” Does the writer intend to convey Indians tend to lose teeth in old age, but others—at least Westerners—don’t? Or maybe he was only conveying that at least the Indian old man was producing coherent sounds, but he—the Hindi-learnt Westerner—could hardly do even this much with all his 32 teeth!
(2) the amount of incorrect content, passed off on unknowing readers easily
Dalits in modern Uttar Pradesh as untouchables? And how do you know they were Dalit women and not simply poor women of any caste? Thick and curly locks of Krishna? Are you sure you didn’t mix up a little of Shiva here?
Indians don’t have such hard Germanic pronounciations as “de birtplace”: simply author’s imagination. Rather it’s the reverse.
(3) the adjectives are simply brought from all parts of modern dictionaries, it seems. Taj’s “esplanade”? “pointing a crooked forefinger at minarets and domes separated from the temple by a barbed-wire fence.”? What purpose did “crooked” serve here except filling up the article even more?
Ankur Agarwal 02.26.09 | 10:07 AM ET
Oh, so sorry, it was three reasons. After belabouring so much over author’s inconsistencies, so embarassing that I should produce one!
James C 02.26.09 | 10:49 AM ET
I don’t think Tayler has an iota of racism in his gene or he wouldn’t have embarked on this life-threatening odyssey. Instead his myriad journeys are those reflecting the love of a human being has for our planet’s varied people, cultures and traditions, traits that are found in most travellers of his genre. Would Adolf Hitler cared to visit the Holy Land? Being familiar with the unique style of Indian’s mangling of spolen English, I can only say Tayler succeeded brilliantly in describing this phonetic idiosyncracies in a way which I had failed. Way to go Tayler!
Jim Benning 02.26.09 | 11:03 AM ET
Agreed. I find it disturbing that some people confuse evocative description with racism. It’s racist to describe the man’s lack of teeth and the way he spoke? I’m sorry, but that’s what writers do. They describe the world as they see it and as they hear it. And that’s very different from making a blanket statement about an entire race of people.
Tayler’s journey, and the care with which he wrote these stories, reflect his appreciation of the place and people.
Ankur Agarwal 02.27.09 | 1:01 AM ET
It’s even more disturbing for me that people nowadays find no difference between “evocative description” and description meant to typify a people. That people fail to catch the tone of an author. “Life-threatening odyssey”? In what sense? And why wouldn’t a racist undergo that? There would be something which would make him feel superior finally!
Ankur Agarwal 02.27.09 | 1:11 AM ET
And what about the content? Almost everything is author’s imagination. The author does not even leave history at large.
In Part 2, sample this: “Muslim invaders defeated the Hindus here in 1526, inaugurating centuries of Moghul domination.” The battle was fought between Muslims on both sides. There was no Hindu angle to it. Either just be evocative, or know better history!
I don’t even want to talk about what does “Muslim invaders” mean! Moghuls were Moghuls: there was Muslim Sultanate since centuries before 1526, and Moghuls didn’t represent the oncoming of Muslims in India!!!
James C 02.27.09 | 2:22 AM ET
It doesn’t tax my imagination to strenous level to picture the horiffic road accidents occuring everyday on the thousand mile long Grand Trunk Road even without the telling anecdotes that Tayler had inserted in his writings. In my country Malaysia, 23 million population has an average of 20 FATAL road accidents PER DAY. If cycling a clanky bicycle on a highway where 16 wheelers trucks, and a motley assortment of wheeled contraption zoom pass you while you have to decide whether to overtake a bullock cart or brake for the bovines’ right of way is not putting yourself in harm’s way, I don’t know what is.
“And why wouldn’t a racist undergo that? There would be something which would make him feel superior finally!”
But of course, there are 1001 ways a racist can make himself feel superior to the down trodden, but this cycling method couldn’t even make it to the list.
Rich is the tapestry of characters one meets on a journey especially in Asia, and Ankur you are one of them whether you like it or not. I bear no malice. It has been my dream to visit India one day but not by peddle power nor ensconce in the aircon comfort of coaches. I need some courage.
jeffrey tayler 02.27.09 | 2:32 AM ET
From the Author:
I’m gratified that my account of cycling the GTR has won such attention from Worldhum’s readers. But the accusations of racism in the comments section here merit careful rebuttal. These charges, levied baselessly, in essence aim to stifle free speech about India, a country whose economic might and nuclear arsenal, among other things, no doubt will ensure it high media visibility for a long time to come. What’s often missing from media reports—the up-close and personal of what it’s like to actually be there, for an outsider—is something I’ve tried to present in my account here.
I never imagined I’d one day find myself responding to a complaint from a Mister Softee Inc. vice president by the name of James Conway. But that day has come. James Conway accuses me of “more than a trace of racism” but adduces no examples to support his potentially defamatory charge—none. His implication that I hired one of his employees as a cycle rickshaw driver in Mathura is as puzzling as it is unsubstantiated, or, more probably, inadvertent. My driver there proudly wore a turban, and it is my right to describe this headware as I see fit. It is James Conway’s right to embarrass himself with frivolous Internet postings, as he sees fit.
My second attacker, Ankur Agarwal, uncovers “venal racism” in my account. (“Venal”? RW?) He then slides into specious double standards when he attributes racist intent to my sympathetic portrait of my guide, Brij, who happened to have lost teeth and spoke unclearly as a result. I describe Brij’s manner of speech accurately. Why should I not have? What supposedly egalitarian purpose would I have served by falsifying my description through the sin of omission? And where in that graph do I imply dental differences between Indians and “Westerners”? I think we all understand that people everywhere lose teeth, especially as a result of age. The “hard Germanic pronounciations” (sic) are the commentator’s inferences, not mine.
It was my error to cite Hindus as the Moghuls’ opponents in the Battle of Panipat; Babur’s troops were fighting other Muslims. But their victory did begin Moghul rule. Ankur Agarwal is free to think what he wants about my writing, of course, but he needs to hone his criticisms: “esplanade” is a noun, not an adjective; “crooked” is aptly used; and Krishna, according to the Bhagavad Gita, rode with Arjuna, not Shiva (whom I never mention). But caste remains a contentious political and social issue in “modern” (his word) Uttar Pradesh, especially in the countryside. Caste is a problem some in India are trying to exploit, others resolve. My heart goes out to the latter; not to those hoping to cover it up.
In sum, in this account for Worldhum I was endeavoring to set down what it was like for me to embark on a bike trek across a country that has given me the truest, most beneficial and consoling philosophies I have ever encountered—the philosophy of renunciation and detachment as set down in the Bhagavad Gita, and the worldview of the Buddha as described in so many texts. It was not an easy trek, and only the strength I derived from these readings and from the people I met along the way, many of whom were wonderful to me, allowed me to complete it.
Jeffrey Tayler