There’s more to India for a South African traveller than just Mahatma Gandhi and cricket
Lauren Shantall
‘Hello! What country?” So goes the “getting-to-know-you” mantra in India. You’ll hear it often enough if you decide to slake a Western thirst with the clichd promise of the East.
Luckily for the South African tourist, this typical curiosity just happens to combine perfectly well with another widespread cultural trait: the Indian penchant for cricket.
Say you’re from the sunny South of Africa, and you’ll be almost instantly regaled with praise for the sporting prowess of the national team. Ironically, in India I learnt far more about “our” batting averages than I ever cared to back home, and became quite used to the unabashed admiration with which avid fans would exclaim, “Hansie Cronje!” or “Jonty Rhodes!”
Cricket may be a post-colonial relic of the British occupation, but it nonetheless remains an institution, and one that was bowling over the media while I was there. I had to refrain from cursing when “Hansiegate” broke, fearing that my finest conversation-opener was out for a duck. While I relished the insight into the country’s cricket craze, I was usually far more thankful for any subsequent revelations about India’s many religions, climatic variations, cultures, languages and problems. Yet I need not have worried that the cheers would be replaced by awkward silences. The ensuing match-fixing skandaal actually proved the finer ice-breaker as I traversed the country from its southern tip, across the Thar Desert and the Ganges floodplain, to the northern heights of the Himalayas.
India is not always the easiest country to negotiate, not even with the help of some handy lines about sport, a map, several train tickets and a smattering of Hindi. For fresh-eyed foreigners coming from the far-flung shores of the first world, the poverty, pollution and attitudes towards women appear incongruous with a newly nuclear power. Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Jews and Jains all form part of the burgeoning population – one which recently gained its billionth official citizen. India, with all its contrasts, can seem incomprehensible.
Travellers are renowned for sprouting as many pet theories about India as there are sacred bovines chewing cud on street corners. Having grown up in Durban, I was foolishly confident that I could tell my naan (bread) from my paan (betel). But it is one thing to have read about satyagraha and seen the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Pietermaritzburg and quite another to find yourself in the very land that initially formed and finally assassinated him.
For India defies overarching explanations and neat travelogue treatises expounding its delights. It can be terrible, it can be irritating, and it can be incomparably magnificent – often within the same hour. Like it or not, much of India’s tourist route has been well worn by decades of previous visitors clutching their guidebooks.
On your way to breathtaking sights, you’re an obvious target for underhanded touts, sharp-as-a-bed-of-nails rickshaw wallahs and commission agents notorious for their rip-off scams. But adopt a negative attitude, and you’re done for. Successful travel in India requires that preconceptions and impatience be transcended.
Because once you’ve embraced the exhilarating logic of your journey, something of that promise of exotic India may be fulfilled. On board a barge, I floated down the backwaters of Kerala, an inland network of waterways and lakes, which flow through endless coconut palm forests where fish eagles turn in concentric air circles, and past small fishing villages where traditional, cantilevered Chinese nets stand like the water-locked skeletons of ancient monsters. As the boat slid lazily past waterside churches, Hindu temples and an 11th-century image of Buddha, it was easy to forget that I’d been tempted, however fleetingly, to follow a live match between South Africa and India instead.
Two months and several hundred kilometres later, I had made it up to the looming wall of Himalayan rock, known to Sanskrit poets as the measuring rod of the world. In McCleod Ganj, home to the Dalai Lama, the only games I could possibly watch were held outside the main temple, where pairs of clean-shaven, maroon-robed Tibetan monks would debate in the shadow of snow-clad peaks.
Wherever you find yourself, nothing disappoints. But if I was made conscious of anything (besides the cricket score) during my sojourn in India, it was of my nationality. “South Africa!” I would reply to the endless, polite queries. For the world has flocked to India for centuries. And in turn, India, overwhelmingly diverse India, embraces the world in the way that only … Well, I’ll spare you my personal pet theory.