For my final blog entry I want to reflect a little bit further on my experience during the two weeks that I spent in Gujarat. The entire tour was an eye-opening and life changing experience. It was my first time visiting a new country and traveling to a new continent. I wasn’t sure what to expect and I was quite nervous. While I have traveled before, I was told that nothing could prepare me for India and, particularly with the topic that we were researching, I knew that it was going to be a very intense experience.

Upon my arrival to India, my first experience was an unforgettable taxi ride from the Ahmedabad airport to the hotel we were staying in. That ride seemed to confirm everything that I had been told about India. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it to the hotel alive as the driver courageously and aggressively blew through every intersection. The traffic lights in the intersections themselves were just flashing a yellow light, an unheeded reminder to slow down and be careful. But I also saw beautiful murals, an elephant walking down a busy city street, and children flying kites. I knew that India would be intense, in-your-face, and require a lot of cultural adjustments, but I was also extremely excited about the fantastic and beautiful new land that I was going to visit.

The remainder of my visit didn’t disappoint at all. The trip was tiring but we had an incredible opportunity to meet with many different individuals on many different levels of society that were all, in some way, affected by the 2002 violence. While we heard many tragic and awful stories that could have colored my opinion of India in general, I tried to understand all of the complexities of the society and not let what we were examining completely tarnish my image of the whole country. All of these meetings and experiences helped to give me a very strong, first-hand understanding of the reality on the ground in Gujarat. While this understanding was naturally inadequate, given that I only had two weeks in country, it allowed me to scratch the surface of a critical situation in a way that I never had before.

While the trip was tough, both physically and emotionally, it was an absolutely unforgettable experience. On a personal and professional level I feel that I grew enormously with the exposure that I had both to a new culture and to the tragic reality of the 2002 communal violence/genocide and its aftermath. Even though the picture that I got in Gujarat was far from rosy, I met with many inspirational people doing fantastic work. Additionally, I was very much intrigued and fascinated by the colorful, energetic culture, and I loved the delicious cuisine. This entire trip, and the research and work I did both before and after the actual excursion, will be a completely unforgettable experience for me. I would love to go back to India one day and learn more about what this fascinating country and culture has to offer.

I had the unique opportunity this semester to go on school research trips to both Gujarat and Cuba, which gave me an interesting perspective on what was happening in both of these countries. For this blog entry I will offer a brief contrast between some of the key features of the two locations. This is naturally a gross oversimplification that should be explored in greater depth than is possible in a blog entry, but it offers some interesting points of comparison that have resonated with me through reflection on both trips. The two models of development found in both places are diametrically opposed; Cuba is desperately (and in many ways unsuccessfully) fighting against what Gujarat has embraced but Gujarat has the influx of foreign investment that Cuba is desperately seeking. A comparison between the two different places illustrates the ideological differences between the two development models and the effect that those differences have on their populations.

Gujarat has embraced the neoliberal development model which seems to have fit well into the mercantilist culture that has traditionally been a part of the Gujarati way of life. The Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, has opened up the doors of the state to foreign investment, attracting large corporations that raise the GDP of the state but don’t equally benefit the residents, particularly the Muslim minority that were victims of the state-sponsored violence of 2002. Cuba, on the other hand, has maintained a somewhat strict socialist system (capitalism has definitely made some inroads, but not to the degree that it has in other formally socialist states such as China). While the Cuban government, like the Gujarati government, wants to increase foreign investment and tourism dollars in the country, they are attempting to do so in a way that doesn’t violate the core principles of the revolutionary government.

The varying results are very interesting and were clearly observable to me, even though I was a complete outsider in both countries and spent merely 2 weeks in Gujarat and 1 in Cuba. I saw a much greater level of commercial development in Gujarat than in Cuba; everything in Cuba has a faded look to it and while buildings have been refurbished in the tourist areas, there is essentially no new visible development anywhere. Tied in to this commercial development, a greater level of wealth is definitely much more visible and present in Gujarat than I found in Cuba, which is, across the board, quite impoverished. However, there is a much more equality in Cuba. While nearly everyone on the island has limited wealth, the extreme poverty of the slums and IDP camps in Gujarat simply don’t exist in Cuba. No one makes much money (doctors have a monthly salary of merely $25 USD), but no one is starving, living on the streets, or living in the extremely precarious situation found in the slums of Gujarat. That level of equality spreads to others areas of life in Cuba as well; everyone has the same good access to education and healthcare and while the influx of tourist dollars has created a dual economy that benefits some Cubans more than others, the great divisions between wealth and poverty found in other places, such as Gujarat, do not exist. There is very little comparison between the two places on the question of religion; the tensions between Hindus and Muslims were at the core of what we were examining in Gujarat whereas Cuba has had no real history of communal violence.

One area of common ground between Gujarat and Cuba, however, is the heavy handed government practices that are used to maintain their particular models of development. It is important to clarify, that the ideological underpinnings of the two governments couldn’t be more different, there is really very little that can specifically be compared between the two forms of government, but their strict commitment to their vision of society’s future and their use of “ends-justify-the-means” tactics to achieve those goals do have a significant point of comparison. Whether it is hyper-capitalism and neo-liberal development with a Hindu fundamentalist edge or whether it is a rigid and ideologically pure form of socialism and rebellion against the forces of capitalism that have seduced the rest of the world, both Gujarat and Cuba have maintained a vision of development that hasn’t always been beneficial to their population. With the potential ending of the US embargo (or blockade as Cubans like to call it) in the near future, we will see if Gujarat’s model will eventually become Cuba’s model.

One of my main projects while I was in Gujarat was the creation of a documentary film that will in some way hopefully capture the experience that we had during our two weeks in Gandhi’s land.  Going into the project, I had no idea what kind of film that I would be able to complete.  I wasn’t sure if we would be able to get extensive interview footage to piece together a traditional documentary about the fallout from the 2002 violence or whether I would simply be making a short piece about our experience.  Since I wasn’t sure what was going to work out, I decided to go in with an open mind and simply film everything that I could and see what would emerge from my footage.

During my time in Gujarat I was able to take about 9 hours worth of footage in various locations.  I got just a small amount of actual interview footage with people on the ground, so I won’t be able to put together a traditional documentary about our research, but I did get a lot of great access and a lot of great footage in other areas that we visited, particularly in the villages and slums.  It was a very interesting experience going in with the camera, but generally the reactions that I got were very positive.  We weren’t able to film our actual research questions, as this would have made it uncomfortable for many people to talk candidly, but there was a great deal of enthusiasm on the street and in different locations, particularly on the part of kids, to get on camera and say hi to us.

Now that I am back in the States I have had a chance to go through all of the footage, and I am very impressed with what I have seen.  Looking back over what I was seeing for the first time through the lens of my video camera gave me a very different perspective on what I saw.  While it didn’t have the immediacy of what I was actually experiencing while I was in the locations, particularly the sequence that I shot in the slum, it was forceful enough to bring me back to the places that I had been.  Restricting myself to only what I saw through the camera, allowed me to make some connections and realizations that I hadn’t noticed when I was first on the ground (possibly because I was distracted by my filming).  This was particularly evident both during my filming in the slum and in the village in Radhanpur.  While I was in the slum, everything was complete chaos as we were being ushered from one place to the next and I was trying to make sure that I caught everything that I could while also staying safe and not getting lost.  Now going back over the footage, I can appreciate all of the different elements that I was seeing in the slum.  In the footage from the village in Radhanpur, the dynamic of the family was really amazing.  While I did appreciate this unique dynamic when I was there on the ground, going back and looking at it allowed me to see all of the little nuances, facial expressions, and movements of the veils which told so much about the complicated forces of gender and power at play in that family.

Now I need to plan how to put this together into an actual film.  While I don’t think the interviews and people speaking on the ground are strong enough to put together a traditional documentary, I think that there is a powerful, if more subtle, film in this footage.  Now it’s time to get to work on editing it together!

I have now been home for three weeks and have been settling into the routine of my new semester.  After the chaos of returning, driving back down to California, finding a place to live and getting through the introductory weeks, I am now able to sit down and begin to reflect more deeply on all of the different things that I saw and experienced during my two weeks in Gujarat.  It was one of the most intense, fascinating, and life-altering experiences that I have ever had and is certainly not something that I will soon forget.  I walked away with many important lessons that I will hopefully be able to carry forward with me into whatever future work I end up doing.

One of the key lessons that I am able to walk away from this experience with is how important it is to understand the reality on the ground in a given location.  You can’t fully understand a place and its issues simply by reading about it in a book. You also can’t fully understand a place in just two weeks, but having that on-the-ground perspective gives you a much more accurate picture.  I was able to appreciate this as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South America, but combining that sense of authenticity that going into another community gives you with actual academic research of a given topic was a new and very valuable experience for me.

Another key lesson is the complexity of any given situation, particularly a place such as Gujarat that has experienced so much conflict and communal violence.  Nothing is simple and nothing can be put into black in white terms; in a place as complex and contradictory as Gujarat everything exists in shades of grey.  From the research I was conducting on Gandhi to the experiences that we had in the slums, there were many different levels of complexity and many different realities present in the one physical space that we were visiting and researching.  Again, this was not a new lesson for me, but seeing it first-hand gave me a much deeper understanding of the complex nature of post-violent societies and of life itself.

Finally, this experience has affected how I will continue to look at my future academic classes and any future research.  There are many people out there offering simple solutions, but a simple solution or an easy answer to a situation is most likely going to be the wrong one.  It is crucial to dig deeper, to investigate, and to try and come up with a more complete understanding of the dynamics of a given situation.  As I continue with my research into Gandhi’s role in Modern Gujarat, I will take what I learned on the ground and try to investigate and examine it further to come up with an analysis which will surely fall far short, but which will hopefully be heading in the right direction based on the many lessons that I learned in Gujarat.

We had some great opportunities to meet and interact with children during the time we were in Gujarat, particularly at the mission schools that we stayed at.  I have always had a natural affinity with kids which was the main reason that I spent my first career, before coming to graduate school, in education.  I have also found that, for me personally, kids are the easiest to interact with in a foreign country.  Even though there is a greater language barrier, as the English of children in India is very limited, I find that there is less of a communication barrier as children have not yet learned to put up that wall that we as adults have all so carefully constructed around ourselves throughout the course of our lives.  Children are more honest, open, trusting, interested and sincere.  We witnessed this time and time again as the kids rushed out to greet us, touch us (unfortunately particularly those of us with white skin), pose for photos, and ask us about what villages we came from.  How then can we resolve the experience that we had with these children with the overall research that we were doing on communal violence in Gujarat?  Here are a couple of anecdotes from our trip that help to explore this situation.

Our primary interaction with children was at the mission in Bhiloda where we got to talk to the kids, play with them, and help them practice their English while trying to pick up a few words in Gujarati.  The kids in this school were from rural tribal villages and were from a mixed religious background (although the mix was only Hindus and Christians).  The overwhelming characteristic that I noticed with these children was their innocence and curiosity.  It was hard to imagine any of them growing up with a degree of hatred or animosity towards another group that could result in violence on the scale of the 2002 pogrom, and this was a trait that the fathers were trying to further instill in the kids.  But culture plays a powerful role and allows these innocent children to turn into the BJP youth brigades that are at the forefront of the party’s campaigns.  Precisely because kids are so innocent and trusting, they are more vulnerable to this poisonous indoctrination.

The other factor with regards to children that weighed heavily on me was the effect of systematized marginalization on their psyches and their ability to grow up in a healthy manner.  The innocent, giggly children at Bhiloda were growing up in a world where they are being marginalized based on their social status as Dalits.  In Ahmedabad, we regularly witnessed many children begging in the streets, a heartbreaking situation that went beyond simple marginalization to a system of complete exploitation.  One encounter, however, with a child that we met in one of the Muslim IDP communities really brought home the notion of marginalization that these kids were facing.  Much like the kids in Bhiloda, this kid was very bright and curious about the group of foreigners that were visiting his neighborhood.  While the boy didn’t say anything, his mother explained that he had to walk quite a few kilometers to the closest school and even though he had finished the 5^th standard (5^th grade), he never learned to read because the teachers didn’t really put much effort into teaching them everything.  At this point he looked shyly at his mother and then ran off to play in the garbage and open sewage that covered his neighborhood.  When a child grows up only knowing filthy neighborhoods, schools that don’t teach, displacement and division based on his religious background, what can be expected of his future?

The innocence, joy, curiosity and open, trusting nature of children is so refreshing to see, particularly from our adult perspective where our lives have taught us to build these carefully constructed walls and limit what we allow in.  But those walls can get built up very quickly in these children when they are exposed to the cruelty, marginalization, and exploitation of that adult world, leading kids to take up arms and continue the cycle of violence.

One of the many truly inspiring stories that we heard during the course of our two weeks in Gujarat was the story of Manvendra Singh Gohil, the former crown prince of Rajpipla and the first Indian royal to come out of the closet.  We met Manvendra at the house of the founder of Lakshya Trust, the first and only LGBT rights organization in Gujarat.  We had not originally arranged to meet him, so it was a magnificent surprise that he was there, as he is quite a celebrity, and was willing to share his powerful story with us.

Manvendra is a member of the royal family of the former Princely State of Rajpipla, in southern Gujarat.  After independence, the princely states of India were subsumed into the modern political divisions of the country granting their royal families only symbolic status.  After 1971, the royal families of these states had to use the qualifier “former” in front of their royal titles as the Indian princely order was abolished.  However, these families still, even to this day, hold a great deal of importance and are widely recognized and revered throughout India.  This made Manvendra’s decision even more difficult.  After an obviously unsuccessful marriage, he decided to use his voice and his position as a former prince to support the cause of gay rights in India.  It was an extremely risky decision for which he initially paid a heavy price.  When his coming-out statement was printed in the national newspapers, he was officially disowned by his family and effigies of him were burnt in the streets of Rajpipla.  He had the courage and bravery to ride out the criticism, though, and things got much better for him.  His family has accepted him again and one of his uncles is even writing his biography.  He has become the face of LGBT rights in India, has appeared on the Oprah show, and has participated in many international pride festivals and LGBT rights conferences.

It was inspiring to talk with Manvendra and to see an organization that is making some of the first moves for LGBT rights in India, a country that while being the world’s largest democracy is very far behind the curve with regards to the LGBT community.  In relation to the larger research of our trip, though, it was obvious that the Lakshya Trust was put into a very difficult position.  When asked about the 2002 violence, the director side-stepped around the issue.  It was very obvious that they were very concerned as an organization and tried to build a sense of a gay community to unite the Hindu and Muslim communities that were so brutally divided in 2002.  However, Lakshya was put into a very delicate position that reflects the position that may LGBT organizations face around the world.  The fight for their rights is so difficult, particularly with the legal status of homosexuality in India at the time, that they have to be extremely careful with every move that they make.  Additionally, they had a certain degree of support from the government for their work on HIV/AIDS so they could not risk that at all by making any sort of stand on or speaking out against the 2002 violence.  Unfortunately, LGBT rights organizations in many countries often can’t afford to take a strong stand on other political issues in a country, even when those issues may have a very detrimental long-term effect on their community.

This blog entry is kind of a negative one, but it is a thought that has be going over and over in my head, particularly after visiting the slums.  On Thursday, we visited another Muslim relocation camp on the south side of Ahmedabad which was one of the most oppressive and depressing slums that we saw.  While the houses seemed like orderly, government-constructed relocation houses, the setting and the services were absolutely dismal.  It was located near a foul-smelling landfill, surrounded by factories, and the streets were filled with sewage and garbage, which barefoot kids were playing in.  The residents were complaining about the fact that their water was so bad it was sending them to the hospital with diseases and turning their skin a darker color.  On the topic of education, they said that many of their kids made it to the higher grades, but they never actually learned how to read or write because the state of the schools was so terrible.  Not only were the schools bad, but the students had to walk a couple of kilometers to get to the nearest school, even though the Indian education code states that there needs to be a primary school within 1 km of every village or neighborhood.

But these people were the lucky ones.  They escaped the carnage of 2002 and they made it out alive and have some sort of hope for the future, even though they lost many of their family members.  However, with the squalor that they are being forced to live in, that hope for the future seems very dim.

Reflecting back on my experiences in the slums, particularly the resettled Muslim communities, I couldn’t help but think of George Orwell’s novel 1984.  People who we talked to in each of the Muslim slums that we visited all talked about how they have a member of their community who is a BJP representative or a representative who comes in from the outside to push them towards supporting their political party and particularly their candidate, the Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who overwhelmingly won the recent elections.  This is probably the role that the young man from the Muslim slum had played who talked to us about supporting Modi in order to get on the development bandwagon even though he had lost his father in the carnage.  The sad irony of this situation is that Modi and the BJP party orchestrated the carnage that put these communities in this situation in the first place and they are the political force that is keeping them in their oppressed condition.  At the end of 1984, Winston finally gets so completely broken down by the complete and absolute power of Big Brother that he is pushed finally to the point where he willingly renounces his previous rebellion and completely declares his love for Big Brother, before finally being executed.  While this is a very extreme comparison, I see the same forces at work here.  The political establishment of the BJP party is not satisfied with simply oppressing the Muslim community of Gujarat, they want them to fully accept and embrace their oppression and wholeheartedly support their oppressor.  The community has not laid down and accepted their fate as Winston had, but that seems to be what the government is aiming for.

We spent the day in the slums today, which is an experience that I will not soon forget.  The first slum we visited was called Sanjaynagar and was a Hindu slum.  We had an interesting, and at times tense discussion with the residents and then got a tour of the slum, which I was able to film with the help of my assistant cameraman, a young resident who attached himself to my side and showed me the best places to film.  All of the lanes were tiny and the houses were packed in tightly.  There was a certain dignity to the houses, but the situation in the slum was very miserable and the houses were so packed that most people had to do their cooking in the street, next to the streams of sewage.  We had to hurry out of the slum, though when a local political official came.  We headed on to a primarily Muslim slum that was built on the site of a graveyard.

The second two slums that we visited had many of the same problems, but they also had a very different character.  Charthoda was built surrounding a cemetery, which, although the idea of a slum in a cemetery was a horrifying notion at first, actually gave it the feeling of having a little more open space in which to tend animals and to have kids play.  However, this open space was on top of the graves themselves, which gave it an added tragic element.  After Charthoda, we moved on to  Odhav.  This slum didn’t have the open space that Charthoda had but it also wasn’t as crowded as Sanjaynagar.  The general problems of garbage everywhere, open sewage, lack of electricity (or limited electricity), poor schools, lack of space and internal divisions plagued all of the slums that we saw.  There is a distinct hierarchy within the slum itself that reinforces the caste hierarchy in society at large. This is the societal force that is forcing people to live in these slums in the first place, but the residents are in no way challenging the notion of caste; they have divided themselves up much in the same way that the rest of society has been divided up.

Finally, we visited a Muslim community that had many families that had been relocated after the 2002 violence.  We spoke with a man who described how his entire family had been murdered while he was in the hospital, recovering from an injury inflicted on him by one of the rioters.  Two other women discussed losing husbands and family members and one young man talked about losing his father.  The stories were heartbreaking and it was extremely painful to listen to.  In many ways we have been desensitized to brutal violence by the fact that it so often appears in headlines and on the evening news, but hearing it first hand from a person sitting a few feet away from you was a truly devastating experience.  I felt completely helpless with a painful desire to try and do something to ease the suffering of these people, but with the knowledge that there is nothing I would be able to do.  When asked who was to blame for the violence, they very clearly stated that it was the current chief minister, Narendra Modi, but, very interestingly, the young man who we talked to last said that despite the fact that he understands that Modi was probably to blame for the 2002 riots, he still supports him.  His argument, while it was most likely politically motivated, essentially stated that the only way for the Muslims to become a part of the modern development of Gujarat was to put the past behind them and declare their support for the orchestrator of the carnage 10 years ago.  The way he delivered his point was hard to argue with, but it showed his powerlessness to fight against the greater forces of power that are at play in Gujarat.  Through further discussion, we also realized that he very well may have been sent there as a representative of Modi’s political party, the BJP, specifically to feed us this line.

All of the experiences in the slums today were completely heartbreaking and this was probably the most emotionally difficult days of the trip.  It wasn’t completely without hope, but the intensity of the manner in which people in the slums are so utterly and completely marginalized was extremely sobering.

My investigation began right away on the first day as we visited some of the main Gandhi sights in Ahmedabad.  We started the day at the Kochrab Ashram.  As we arrived, there was a group of westerners waiting around to visit the ashram and do a spiritual study of Gandhi’s teachings.  Gandhi is held on such a high pedestal in the west that he has become a mythical figure.  His message of ahimsa, or non-violence, has placed him with figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa as representatives of the struggle for human rights.  I wanted to understand the person behind the symbol, which began to be revealed to me throughout the day.

We followed our visit to the ashram with a visit to Gujarat Vidyapeth, a university dedicated to Gandhi’s teachings.  As we walked on to the beautiful campus we noticed all of the students wearing khadi, or the home-spun clothing that Gandhi promoted as a way to resist dependency on the British for their clothing.  We met the director who gave us a beautiful talk about the values of ahimsa in modern day life, particularly in relation to the exploitation and destruction of our bodies, over fantastic cups of masala tea.  After discussing Gandhi with the director we were invited to visit a prayer session where all of the young students came to spend an hour each day spinning khadi and saying their prayers.  Finally we ended the visit by touring a small tribal museum and eating a delicious Gujarati lunch at the cafeteria.  The campus was beautiful and I left with a sense of peace, but this place also  started to make more concrete the feeling that I had that Gandhi is becoming more and more irrelevant to modern Gujarat, or modern society in general.  The university offers the students, most underprivileged, a great opportunity to continue their education, but they are also dedicating a great deal of time, energy, and effort to tasks such as spinning khadi and wearing traditional clothing that seem to have very little space in today’s society.  They are symbolic gestures, which I am beginning to feel sums up Gandhi’s role in the 21^st century.

We ended the day by visiting the Sabarmati Ashram, the main Gandhi ashram in Ahmedabad.  We were given a tour around the ashram and got a lot of insight into Gandhi’s life, particularly the problematic relationship that he had with his wife, Kasturbai.  After the tour, we met with the director who had many great insights on Gandhi.  He reaffirmed the fact that Gandhi has been reduced to a symbol and that the Gandhi movement is not really a movement anymore, but rather is just a series of institutions.  Many of my conversations throughout the rest of this trip have started to reinforce this idea and refocus my thoughts on this topic.

It is the eve of my departure on a journey to a new country and a new continent.  India is a country that has always fascinated and intrigued me, but it is a country that I knew little about before beginning my preparation for this trip.  It seems to be a land of contradictions; a modern, advanced economy but a country full of extreme poverty, the birthplace of eastern religions, swamis, gurus and mysticism that has so entranced spiritual western progressives but also the home of religious extremism and fundamentalism, the land of Gandhi and non-violence but also the site of constant “communal violence” and frequent riots.  I have spent the last few months reading and studying as much as I can about this foreign land, but I feel that I am only beginning to scratch the surface.

I have chosen to research the topic of Gandhism and non-violence and what relationship that it has with the terrible riots that occurred in the state of Gujarat after the 2002 burning of a train car full of Hindu pilgrims in Godhra.  These riots saw the death of about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, and wanton destruction of the homes, businesses, and communities of the targets of this killing spree.  While the fact that this violence occurred anywhere is horrible enough, there is a bitter irony in the fact that these riots, and a disproportionately large amount of the communal violence that has happened throughout India over the past few decades, have occurred in the state and city where Gandhi’s ashram is located and where he began his movement for non-violent resistance.  It seems that today, Gandhi’s notions of non-violence and secularism have been replaced by religious fundamentalism, polarization, and violence for political ends.

It is this huge contradiction, which is rooted in the many other contradictions of India, that I hope to learn more about in this excursion.  I have done much reading and research so I am beginning to have an idea of some of the causes and factors at work in the current political situation in Gujarat, but I want to go out on the ground and find out directly from the people of Ahmedabad and Gujarat what the situation is and what role Gandhi’s values play in Modern India.

The bags are packed, the malaria regimen has begun, and my curiosity has been aroused as I get ready to step out and discover a new land, hopefully to get a better understanding of both its beauty and its problems.