Victoria Regina vs. Technicolor Hippies
“My grandfather was a barber to the British,” says this umpteenth-generation barber in Dalhousie, India
In India, Victorian England is alive and well with all its stuffy floweriness and chastity belts. Picture yourself in a café painted in sombre greens. A Brahmin gentleman at the table next to yours takes Queen & Lion brand snuff out of an ancient-looking tin cylinder. A hand-painted sign on the wall reads “TIFFIN – 3:00.” Dusty black and white portraits of all the shop owners and their extended family clog the walls, hung at 45 degree angles. Underpaid Dickensian kids scurry about on all fours cleaning the floor with rags. Other higher-caste kids hurtle around refilling your glass with dysenteric water. If they’re not quick enough, their fat employers yell and slap them around.
The Brahmin gentleman remains indifferent to the bustle around him. He sits there, head raised, prattling on about the degeneracy of the irreligious and the filthiness of the lower-class plebes (who, ironically, do all the washing up around him). Because of his Christian education at private Anglo-Indian institutions in the Himalayas, he can recite Wordsworth couplets effortlessly and peppers his speech with distorted anachronistic clichés: “Actually, my darling sir, to perform such an action would be as inauspicious as carrying coal to Newcastle.”
To an outsider living in the 21st century, this aspect of India seems like some exotic Bollywood parody of Victorian England. To the actors it is not a joke. It is quite real. But then there are all the hippies…
“This bird was dying by the Ganges and none of the Indians were taking care of it,” says this British hippie in Varanasi, India.
In the left corner are all the Western travellers involved in a play of their own on the same stage. Many of them seem caught up in some strange parody of a bygone India that exists only in the Western imagination. The straighter their country of origin, the greater the desire to let loose, and the wilder the act. Look at all these Swiss, Japanese, and (especially) Israelis dressed in tacky rainbow suits with glow-in-the-dark bindis. The men have their long hair tied up in a knot atop their heads like some cartoon Shiva bearing a didgeridoo. The women are wrapped up in a bundle of pashminas and tie-dyed saris on acid. It’s not Halloween but they’re still dressed up. What an amusing circus of merry pranksters they make!
Most of this bunch seems to travel solely inside their heads. The India around them exists only as an exotic backdrop swathed in a swirling narcotics-induced fog of noise, color, and elephants. Occasionally, they sober up for a minute. Then, they complain that the real pseudo-Victorian India with its noise, filth, and pleated trousers is nothing like the candy-coated multicolour dream India of their banana pancake ghettoes on the old hippie trail that goes from Manali to Goa via Pushkar.
There are two actors here: a “Western Oriental” on one side and an “Oriental Westerner” on the other. You’d think that by seeking to emulate each other they’d have something in common. They don’t. The Bombay Brahmin wonders why this Western backpacker is squatting with filthy clothes and uncombed hair like a lower-class illiterate village hick in a clown suit: “By jove! Why are these Westerners so degenerate when they have so much money and the good breeding that is supposed to come with it? The women don’t even have the good grace to dress modestly (and can you believe they smoke those poor man’s beedi cigarettes on top of it too!)”
The Westerner looks at the Indian and sneers: “Money money money–that’s all these Indians think about, man. They’re like, so out of touch with the true meaning of their own culture. What about the Kama Sutra and all that, man! The end of materialism and shanti shanti. The British empire turned these people into total prudes. It’s so, like, sad.”
I laugh, but then I tend to see satire where others see tragedy. This spectacle of globalization with its promises of fostering mutual understanding is very funny indeed.
Tags: Exploring the City, India, Mumbai, Streetlife
Donal Hanley says:
Patrick
I leave on my first trip to Mumb..Bomb..er, India, later today. Thanks for setting the scene. Unforunately, it looks like i’ll mostly be in meetings but if free I want to see some of the houses of worship – I like seeing the range in a given city.
March 17th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
aj says:
It’s the commodity fetishization of Otherness, isn’t it? The hippie traveller who seeks to throw off the shackles of their stifling White Western upbringing by immersing themself in someone else’s culture — not even someone else’s culture but their own outdated, cartoon version of it. I can’t tell you the number of times well-meaning white folks have expressed that I was “lucky” to be part-Indian, as if whiteness equated to some sort of empty container or blank canvas. Nevermind that I was brought up in Montreal, don’t speak the mother tongue nor do I even consider myself culturally Asian to any great degree at all!
Strangely enough Europeans have the same attitudes towards Canada. But I think I’ll just write a post about that… ;)
March 17th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Donal Hanley says:
As a European Canadophile (sp?) I look forward to that – but what I like about Canada is the lack of sense of otherness – that sense I feel strongly in the US.
I always find it funny to see western raised people who reject their own culture and go off and become buddhist monks or something – they reject a church of rules and ritual and clergy for a temple of, well, rules and ritual and clergy…pretty much the same except that the latter is ‘exotic’!
I’ll mull that further over tiffin.
March 17th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Geoff says:
Well, 3 yrs after you posted this I found it… this is a good summation of the whole thing. Some of the Westerners I have seen while living here have bothered me on such a deep fundamental level and I have only partially been able to figure out why. You did a good job of putting the whole ridiculous, obnoxious thing into words. Really, they disrespect and ultimately misunderstand both their own European/North American heritage and the one they’re trying to adopt — usually much to the disgust of the people who actually legitimately claim this culture. In their minds they have created a grotesque and in the end, false, parody of both cultures.
January 17th, 2011 at 4:25 am