You often hear earnest foreigners talking about the “real India.” They mean village India, relatively untouched by modernity and the outside world

Perhaps there is no such thing as an Indian. The concept falls down as you ask ‘what’s a typical Indian?’ The sense of nationhood divides and sub-divides as you dive in, each definition dissolving from region to region, then by state, by town, then village, down to the way the pagri, the candy-cane wound-around turban of identity, is tied in the desert state of Rajasthan. A north Indian is, say, a Punjabi before he is an Indian, and so it goes down through the states, cut through by the continual history of invasion, domination, colonisation and division. Arguably even today India is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill: merely a geographical expression, a triangle that is home to scores of peoples, civilizations and states, many of them dramatically different and united only by their experience of some level of the British control that was withdrawn in 1947. None of India’s many ancient civilizations, or the successive imperial invaders from the North, starting with the Aryans in 1500 BC, ever managed to impose their will on the whole subcontinent.

There is of course a vast cast of Indian character types as portrayed in books, on television programmes, and in films: the hawk-eyed Rajasthani tribesman, the longhaired holy man meditating in his saffron loincloth, the Dravidian coolie bent double under a giant sack of spices, the moustachioed army officer whose clipped English is flecked with pukka 1920s English slang, the nerdy computer expert, the flashing-eyed, hippy-shaky Bollywood dancing girl, the cranky nationalist politician, the appallingly handicapped beggar, the fabulously rich polo-playing Maharaja. All of these types really do exist, though the majority of India has nothing in common with them. Indeed one of the amazing things about India is the way it lives up to all stereotypical expectations good and bad, and then spectacularly confounds them.

At one of New Delhi’s Barista cafés, a local Starbucks spin-off, you find a youngish, hip crowd, speaking English loudly with accents that hint of educations in the U.S. and U.K. This is the new moneyed middle class of India, an outward-looking group, no longer willing to accept the low-grade food and worse service that was the norm when government restaurants and hotels dominated the service industry. These are the people who work in the software business, at call centres, or any of the other new industries that have sprung up since India lifted its hardline protectionist regulations in the mid-90s. This is a crowd that talks about which hot new Indian author is on the Mann Booker Prize shortlist, why they prefer the latest Hollywood offering to whichever home-cooked all singing and dancing Bollywood movie magic is just out. They drink cappuccinos, not chai, and they wear more designer labels than both Hilton sisters stuck together.

But step outside the café and you see some of other Indias: the chai-wallah boiling up his delicious cardamom-spiked masala, spiced, tea at his spot on the pavement; a fruit salesman pushing his elegantly piled cart of mangoes, pomegranates, oranges and limes; self-important “VIPs” in their miniature limousines en route to Raj-era government bungalows; swarms of half-naked, illiterate migrant workers carrying rocks on their heads to lay the foundations of one of the city’s myriad new network of flyovers. This capital in which all of these people live and work is a separate world to the tea plantations of Assam, the jungles of Kerala, the dusty villages on the Deccan plateau where farmers still use wooden ploughs, or the Tibetan monasteries that look out across the High Himalaya.

You often hear earnest foreigners talking about the “real India.” They mean village India, relatively untouched by modernity and the outside world. But while you cannot claim to have experienced India unless you have seen something of its village life, India’s great and growing cities are equally now the “real India.” Indeed they exemplify the way that India has always been a place in which cultures have combined and cross-fertilized. In the past that has been as a result of the country’s ability to absorb the cultures of its conquerors, today it’s a matter of commerce as the openness of the past decade has made India increasingly friendly to foreign business.

To add to the cross-ferment no one language is spoken by all of India’s diverse peoples. Though Hindi is the official language in almost all of India’s states, many people do not speak or understand it. The people of the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu speak Malayalam and Tamil, both of which have different roots from the main northern languages, Punjabi and Hindi. This is one of the reasons it became so logical for English to become the lingua franca of this multi-lingual nation.

Side by side with the language mix run traditional culinary differences. Indian cuisine is a world unto itself and many foreigners have no idea of its sweeping differences, so often thinking that Indian food is just endless versions on a theme of chicken tikka masala, itself an out-of-India invention of England’s post-pub curry culture. In Goa Portuguese colonial influence led to a strong Iberian flavour. On the east coast the French left their mark and so you can find great croissants in the bakeries of Pondicherry. In enchanting Cochin in Kerala, a centre of the spice trade for two thousand years, there is seafood-based cuisine that shows the influence across the centuries of the city’s various English, Jewish, Moorish and again Portuguese communities.

Many people, especially in the South, are vegetarians and there is probably nowhere in the world where you can get such a variety of superb vegetarian food. On the other hand, North India’s traditions make it paradise for meat-eaters. So often visitors are warned off what has been nicknamed street food, the irony of this being that is it is some of the best, simplest and most freshly prepared Indian food you will find outside an Indian home, the latter being the place where you find the best food, desi khana, unmatchable home-cooking.

Yet for all of India’s bewildering diversity, wherever you go, and no matter how strange the faces or the language, you will find certain inescapable phenomena that seem to sum up a sense of Indianess. These include the ubiquitous “Ambassador” car (based on the 1950s Morris Oxford), the infusion of religion in so many aspects of everyday life, a diminished sense of personal space, and the universal availability of hot sweet milky tea, the chai that has become almost an Indian trademark. Unfortunately also included in the above list is the appalling file-shuffling bureaucracy. Any encounter with Indian officialdom is likely to be frustrating. Bureaucrats often work amazingly few hours and are notorious for their obstructionism and ability to dance constantly along the fine line between outright corruption and the parameters of their official duty.

Perhaps more surprising for us, so a-tuned to the extraordinary success and work ethic of Indians in Britain, is the carelessness so often found even in private businesses in India. One of the great economic facts of Indian life is over-manning: a handful of people assigned to do the work of one. Take a long distance bus journey and you will see four men sitting with the driver in the front, just to keep the driver from getting lonesome. Go to a telephone office and there will be three young men assisting the one who actually dials the numbers while you stand there feeling faintly embarrassed. Many shops are still run like Soviet department stores: you give your order to one person, take a chit to a second one, pay a third and finally receive what you have bought from a fourth.

On the other hand the majority who live below the poverty line work extremely hard. Subsistence farmers labour during every daylight hour to survive, and among the sights that tend to shock visitors to India are the gangs of women repairing and building roads, carrying piles of rocks on their heads and backs, supervised in their tasks by tea-sipping male bosses. Tourists often misunderstand and refuse to hire the porters who offer to carry their luggage at train and bus stations, finding it humiliating to get someone else to carry their bags. This deprives the porters and their dependent families of a livelihood. There is no shame in such work in India, and it is the grace of the people that they so often manage to turn the most basic service into an art all of its own.

To absorb India is to sit and allow it to seep in. So often the great mistake of travellers to the subcontinent is to try and tick off too many things in one go: the classic Delhi, Taj Mahal and Rajasthan circuit perhaps the most-frequented case in hand. Most people have a maximum of three weeks to “discover” India, and perhaps the best way to do this is to pick one region at a time. A twenty-one-day trek in Himachal Pradesh in the foothills of the Himalayas offers a pacing that opens the mountain culture to you as you pass gently through. Three weeks in Rajasthan is probably better spent in just five places rather than the usual gig of another night, another hotel, another fortress, and yet another temple. Even two weeks in Kerala, split between the backwaters of Cochin and Alleppey, the tea gardens of the Western Ghats, and a bit of beach time, allows a visitor to really melt into the easy pace of the enfolding south.

Ten Did You Know Facts About India:

1) Neither tea nor chilli peppers are indigenous to India but were introduced by European colonists.

2) The Indian Constitution recognizes eighteen official languages, including English.

3) Though approximately 80% of Indians are Hindus, India is the world’s second largest Muslim country, after Indonesia.

4) India is the world’s most populous democratic country.

5) It has twenty-eight states plus seven “union territories”.

6) India’s Bombay-based “Bollywood” movie industry has an average annual output of over 800 films, approximately twice the output of Hollywood.

7) The largest employer in the world is the Indian Railways with well over a million employees.

8) You won’t find any curry houses in India. Curry is basically a British version of the Hindi word for gravy or sauce.

9) Yoga is a system rooted in ancient Vedanta that has been practiced in India for thousands of years. It is not just about bending into frightening shapes on a rubber mat but a scientific eight-fold approach to life and living, and probably the oldest philosophy still in popular practice in both the east and west.

10) The highly popular and copied pashmina woollen weave is only found in its genuine form in Kashmir, where it is a combination of the yarn of the cashmere goat and the artisan weaving skills of the Kashmiris, imported from Central Asia by the Mughals.

Focus: The caste system Everyone you talk to in India will give you his or her version of the caste system, and why it is a unique part of the culture. Even though most claim that it is a part of India’s past, it is still ingrained, as though part of the DNA of the social order, particularly in the countryside where the majority of the population still live. At the more modest end of the description scale you may be told that it was simply a natural progression of the human instinct for hierarchy, at the upper end you may be told that it is the only way a country with such a raw divide between rich and poor can exist. Its root is murky but the most probable explanation is that it was created by the upper caste, the Brahmins, in order to protect their superior position. So they created a system of four levels, essentially four classes, with obviously the Brahmins, the priest-class, at the top of the heap. Next come the Kshatriyas, the soldiers and administrators, then the Vaisyas, the artisans and commercial class, and finally the Sudras, the farmers and rural working class. But this is not the bottom. There is the fifth class, the untouchables as they were called, people given the most menial and humiliating jobs such as being sweepers and latrine cleaners. This is the sub-caste that Mahatma Gandhi embraced and renamed as Harijans, the Children of God. Spas One of the latest changes in India for the visitor has been the opening out of the alternative health secrets of the various traditions. The result of this is India’s new generation of spas. In the north at probably one of the world’s best yoga spas, Ananda-in-the-Himalayas (www.anandaspa.com), gentle yoga of the Bihar school is on offer combined with massage and relaxation treatments that essentially give a five-star version of a retreat with very soft edges. The increasingly popular alternative medicine system of Ayurveda is said to be the world’s oldest medical science, deriving from the south of the country. This is a holistic system that embraces a combination of diet, massage, naturopathic herb-based medicine and purification through de-toxification. The massage involves pints of warm oil that lubricate and purify the body, and there are relaxation treatments, such as the one involving a fine flow of warm oil into the forehead, that draw you into a state of quiet that many people spend months of meditation trying to achieve. There are softened down versions of the treatments in many of the new generation of five-star boutique hotels but, for those who want the real McCoy a spa like Somatheeram in Kerala (www.somatheeram.com) re-invents people in a week or ten days so that they re-emerge with an almost maddening aura of being bright-eyed and bushy tailed. Delhi: Reasons For Coming 1) New Delhi is one of the only purpose-built capital cities that achieve real architectural beauty. The elegant bungalow-style buildings of the Lutyens era cleverly combine traditional and modern elements and ideally suit the climate. 2) The city’s many ancient tombs and monuments rival the Taj Mahal in their beauty, and Humayun’s Tomb, on the edge of Old Delhi, was the inspiration for the Taj. 3) The capital’s surprising greenness and openness, in particular its lovely parks and many tree-lined avenues, make up for all the noise, dust and pollution. 4) Here in one place you can sample all of India’s cuisines, buy any of the country’s handicrafts at competitive prices, and arrange easy travel to anywhere in the subcontinent. 5) If you can handle Delhi’s touts, beggars, street-chaos, noise and hard bargaining, then the rest of India will feel like a bit of a walk in the park in comparison

(originally published in ABTA Magazine April 2005)