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. 

This is the first chance I have had to write from the field proper  despite being in India for nearly 2 weeks and in the field site for nearly 4 days. I shall try and be more regular from now on with these online posts and it is hoped that they will become increasingly interactive. Once I have set up a proper internet connection then this should become much easier. Anyway so far there i nothing too exciting to report and (as is normal) much of the time so far has been taken up with practicalities of the sort that are interesting for a certain kind of very reflexive anthropology, but I think not so interesting to me or my project. The first week in Delhi was  in truth not so much fieldwork as a conference, although time there served as an acclimatiser ahead of the fieldwork - that said the plains are not the hills. 

The conference was perhaps the most passionate I have attended and there is much in my field journal that I will not reproduce here. For this is not my field journal more an alternative more public, chatty and interactive thing. In particular I take from the conference a renewed interest in Vibha Arora’s (IIT Delhi) work on sacred landscape in Sikkim. This basically presented a contrast between the governmental role in wrestling power from a Buddhist theocratic minority into the hands of a Hindu majority at the same time as promoting Sikkim as a sacred Buddhist landscape. Other interesting papers included Sipra Mukherjee’s (West Bengal State University) paper on Conversion in Bengal. Here she highlighted what I think Carrithers would call a pollytropic tendency to be able to absorb ideas from other faiths without needing formal conversion. The term used for this kind of phenomenon was Piety rather than religion. A similar phenomenon in the Punjab was noted by Navtej Purewal (University of Manchester) who also highlighted that the official line of Pakistan is often not followed at the vernacular level of Muslim practice in the Punjab. The distinction between official religion (in this case Vedanta) and vernacular religion was also highlighted by Tartu’s Ulo Valk who talked about the difference between Vedanta conceptions of Karma and the conception of Karma expressed in folk tales he has collected in Tamil Nadu: the main difference seems to be that Karma in Tamil Nadu is collective and familiar rather than individual. In later talks he also mentioned some very interesting research he is doing on Magic in the North East.  The rest of the conference was characterised by explosive and often emotional discussions about the role of Religion and Secularism in the formation of the modern Indian state.

The rest of Delhi involved organising a prop jet to fly to Shimla and meeting with ex-Shimlites who helped to foreground the experience and gave handy tips on practicalities, which is of course where my last post left off.

We landed in Shimla in glorious sunshine and to rather warmer weather than expected and wound our way from the air strip to the central mall, where we checked into one of the many guest houses for a few days while finding accommodation.  Shimla mall is a pedestrianised area that winds down the hill side, lined with Tudor looking buildings from which people operate in a distinctly Indian way.  Any hope of finding accommodation in these places soon evaporated as it became clear that we would have to stay off the mall and travel in.  Finding accommodation in Shimla today is as difficult as in the times of the Raj or the 1980s, when Ursula Sharma devoted a chapter of her ethnography to it. I do not intend to replicate Sharma’s practice but suffice to say that as in the past it is today largely a case of going through a network of contacts rather than formal estate agents. Some estate agents do exist but they are so treacherous and unreliable as to be more a hindrance than a help. Fortunately through my wife’s extended family and web of contacts we were able to find some people here willing to rent us a room in their properties; but the prices seem rather inflated.  Ironically the first place shown us was owned by a Sood who offered us the property for around twice the going rate in Tallinn. This is not a surprise as the Soods have been fleecing the British (and to some extent the Bengalis) for property since Shimla began.  The other two were down at the historic Annandale, this is a flat clearing in the forest down in a valet bellow Shimla proper. In the British era it was famous for its picnics parties and theatre displays. Today it is a contested zone with a running battle between various groups for control, the army want it for a helipad, some locals want it for a golf course, others for a cricket pitch and still others for a general green space that locals can freely enjoy.

Contacts have also been made with HP university and they have confirmed that I will be offered an honorary fellowship there in their flagship Integrated Institute for Himalayan studies, as well as talking with the Director of this institute and the Dean for studies I was also able to make contact with other researchers there who are working on some interesting projects regarding both environment and spirituality amongst the tribals of rural Himachal Pradesh. Pleasingly Sukanya has also been offered a part time teaching position in English Literature at the University. Summer Hill is about an hours walk from the mall along a pleasant path but I will certainly loose my Christmas stomach’s swell if I am to do the walk regularly. I have also been to the Kali Bari temple for puja and found peace in this ritual but as often is the case little community.

Today was in a way the first real taste of fieldwork as I attended the morning mass as St Michael's. It is the close season at the moment for the schools and universities, which are on Winter Break until February and this affected the congregation and worship in an unseen way. It seems that a large proportion of the usual congregation are drawn from these institutions and so the congregation was thinner. They also make up the choir and so the service proceeded without a choir. It still fascinatingly alternates English and Hindi in the liturgy as observed last time and still has the wonderful practice of post worship adoration of Mary, that I will write more about again. . This afternoon  I intend to climb Jakhoo hill to the Hanuman temple.

Pictures of everything will follow soon