Kali on Holi

Me on Holi

Holi

Today has been a rather strange day. It was Holi, the festival of colours, which many Indians, including Christians enjoy joining in with. Anthropologists have long commented on it and their is a classic Turnerian analysis of the festival that was published by Marriot back in 1966. However it is strange for Shimla's Christians this year (and on others) because it is also Lent - a time of mourning; it was doubly strange for me as this afternoon I heard that my grandmother died.  Anyway, earlier in the morning we did play Holi with some of our neighbours and here are the pictures. 

Back online again

I am back online after a period in cyber wilderness, during which research has been progressing at a steady pace. I am very pleased to announce an honorary association with Himachal Pradesh University's Institute for Himalayan Studies, http://www.himalayanstudies.com/ and am looking forward to fruitful dialogue both for the Shimla project and other work. 

The hill station is back in full flow now, swelled by the return of those who have been hibernating elsewhere for the winter. The churches are now also more awake again and we also entered the crucial lent period, which was marked last Sunday by performing the stations of the cross - a spatialization of the passion, which deconstructs linear history in an Eliadian sense. 

I will not regularly  post excerpts from my field notes on this blog, which is a complementary outpouring; however to compensate for my lack of posting over the last few weeks,  I will share with any readers an excerpt from my field notes that was written sometime ago, when the Churches, especially Christ Church, were much more subdued:

Shimla Field Log 25/01/2009

We raced to Christ Church, the most notable church on the mall, this morning for an advertised 9am English service. Christ Church is the old Anglican cathedral, today part of the united reformed churches of North India that sits atop the ridge like a fondant church atop a cake. It is the key landmark of Shimla and when people think of Shimla and its European heritage they nearly always think of Christ Church.  After a slightly delayed start We literally raced around the winding roads to the church for the morning service, and arrived around 5 minutes late (I should mention that our house is a good hour’s walk from the central mall).  We entered via a side door and observed a sign saying please remove your shoes, so ever obedient, we took off our shoes added them to the pile, before and padding into the church. The inside surpassed my expectations in terms of the simple, elegant beauty of its construction: high ceiling lit by light filtered through stained glass, rich red carpet leading to a sparkling white alter emblazoned with a blood red cross of St George.  The light was wonderfully filtered and the sound was only that of the cawing crows and whistling wind - peace descended almost instantly. To my dismay and joy the large church was almost empty (dismay because of the implications for research, joy because the emptiness magnified the peace and simple grandeur of the space).  Around four groups of people totalling around 20 were seated silently facing the alter, some in prayer, some just sat in peaceful meditation, one group were noticeably European, the other North East Indian and the remainder a mix of South and North Indian.

 I sat down in a pew, gave up a simple prayer of thanks and quieted my soul in the blissful space. After about 10 minutes of sitting in silent meditation a man appeared carrying books, his demeanour was that of intent devotion to his work, yet his manner was unhurried and untroubled.  5 minutes later he returned with a brush and began sweeping in the same calm focused way and I was reminded of a plaque that stands at the other end of a ridge outlining some of the history of Shimla and above it is engraved the (mistranslated Benedictine) motto ‘Work is Worship’.  The rest of us did not work we just sat there in silence, sometimes minds turned inward in prayer, letting the exterior fuel our inner peace and aide our inner communion; sometimes watching silently the sweeper at work, sometimes noticing the environment in more detail, the stained glass dedicated to a brigadier or a general who died a hundred years ago, or the brass plaques where the colonial ancestors of the place look down on you from, in loving memory, etched into the fabric of the walls. And I realised that no one here was a regular and probably all of us were here for the first time, none of us probably knew what was unfurling and yet we sat there expectant in that place, we sat in silence and received no complex liturgy or homily just the essence of the protestant message, an empty cross, the beauty that they who is created in Her image can create when focused on Her glory, and of course the protestant work ethic,  ‘work is worship’, individualised prayer, confession and salvation. At this point one of the other people there broke the peace by talking to the sweeper who informed us that services were closed for the winter and would begin again in March. So we left and went our separate ways – myself and Sukanya to the now  familiar territory and friendly faces of the Catholic church of  St Michael, for the 10.30 mass, but after half an hour of the most intensely spiritual and resonantly Anglican experience.