Wandering Singer, Haridwar.
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Indian Society and Spirituality
Indian Society and Spirituality
(January)
(January)
This trip will visit sites associated with three Indian religious communities--Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. India has a long history as a religiously plural culture, and independent India's founders explicitly envisioned a country in which members of all religious communities would be equal citizens. We will visit sacred sites associated with each community, see how religious beliefs have been integrated into everyday life, and attempt to discern how their interactions have been (and continue to be) shaped by historical and cultural context.
The tour will visit four north Indian sites:
The tour will visit four north Indian sites:
Delhi: the national capital, and a historically important political center
Agra: The early capital of the Mughul empire, and home to the Taj Mahal
Amritsar: The most sacred site for the Sikh community, and the home of the Golden Temple), AND
Haridwar: a Hindu pilgrimage city on the Ganges River.
These sites are relatively close to each other, so our time will largely be spent IN places, rather than going to places. Intercity travel will usually be by train, in air-conditioned class, which will supply some time for rest, reflection, and discussion.
India's Partition is a connecting thread for all three religious communities. In August 1947, British India was divided into India and Pakistan, an event that Indian nationalists still describe as "vivisection" (that is, cutting up a living organism). One of the forces driving this was Muslim reluctance to live as a minority in a Hindu-dominated democracy. "Pakistan" was originally formed from British India's two Muslim-majority regions--"West Pakistan" in the Punjab (northwest India) and "East Pakistan" in Bengal (eastern India). Since 1971 the latter has been Bangladesh, an independent nation.
Partition's horrific trauma remains profoundly embedded in community and personal memory. As boundaries were redrawn Hindus and Sikhs fled to India (red arrows in image), and many Indian Muslims fled to Pakistan (green arrows). By some estimates 20 million people were displaced and more than one million died. Given the depth of the suffering it is not surprising that its ripples are still visible, just as the bad feeling from a bitter family feud can persist for generations.
Partition forms a significant backdrop for each of the places we will visit. Amritsar is just 10 miles from the current international border, and almost everyone there had friends or family affected by this. Many refugees from Pakistan settled in Haridwar and Delhi, in some cases receiving the property of departed Muslims as compensation. Partition's legacy has also affected India and Pakistan's historical relationship, which has been marked by suspicion, deception, and conflict. Invoking again the dysfunctional family motif, both India and Pakistan are in some ways prisoners of their past.
Our primary daily activity will be visiting religious and cultural sites. This tour will involve occasional casual walking (a mile or so at a time), but the physical demands of this tour will be far less intense than for the Himalaya tour (none of the sites are at any significant altitude).
This trip's primary goals are to experience contemporary Indian culture, and to understand better the historical relationships between these three religious communities (Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs) through experiential, site-specific encounters. I would also hope that this experience will help to spur personal transformation, and in particular the expanded sense of identity, purpose and perspective that is often associated with travel.
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