Malana

The sun-soaked air was filled with dust rising from the road as our ride was making its way uphill on the winding mountain roads. The driver's tiny Maruti Swift kept bouncing from one side of the road to the other, occasionally dangerously close to the edge – a big drop for a small car hardly designed for mountaineous terrain. Large potholes and rocks sticking out dotted the roads that apparently some 4 years ago had been in perfect condition, but thanks to neglect by local politicians, had been let to deteriorate. Indifference that may in the long run claim lives considering how dangerous the moutain roads in Himachal Pradesh can be. Even Himachal, one of the most developed states in India, has not been spared from corruption.

We were on our way to see the village of Malana, a small secluded village on the hills of Parvati Valley in Himachal Pradesh. The village has managed to develop itself a mythical but also infamous reputation amongst backpackers. It is said that the inhabitants of the village of Malana are direct descendants of Alexander the Great's army, who after an arduous journey from Macedonia to the Himalayas decided to desert their leader and settle on the mountains. The way back would have been too much. Allegedly the villagers used to have very distinctly different features compared to the other Himachali people around them, they were said to be almost Greek-looking with light eyes and fairer skin. They also speak a language that is completely incomprehensible to anyone outside the village. The greek ancestry seems to be a myth that the locals like to perpetuate, be it true or not. Other evidence points that there is evidence of the existence of the village in Hindu mythology too. Be it as it may, there are several theories about this, but no tangible proof has been found yet though. The language, Kanashi, also known as rakshas bhasha – demon language, on the other hand has been proven to be a mix of Sanskrit and Sino-Tibetan languages, which makes it completely different from the other languages of Himachal.

This is the mythical side of the story. The village of Malana is also gained an infamous reputation as the home of the best hashish in the world – the Malana Cream. Cannabis grows naturally in abundance on the hills of the village and has always been an important part of the local tradition. Eventually, around 70s, as backpackers were hording to India in search of a party, drugs and enlightenment, some of the more adventurous ones heard stories of a mythical village covered with premium cannabis, growing naturally everywhere. Drug tourism started expanding and the white strangers taught the villagers how to turn the plant into hashish and turn it into a marketable commodity with extremely high demand. The plant had not been used for trade before this in the village. Malana Cream became and international brand amongst cannabis connoisseurs, a luxury treat in the coffee shops of continental Europe. Today, cultivation of cannabis is controlled by European and Israeli drug mafias.

This caught the attention of the local authorities and drug busts became daily. Our car and bags were searched twice on our way out of the village. The village suffered devastating damage due to a big fire in 2008. They say the fire began from a short circuit, but according to a popular rumour, the fire was in fact set by the local police to finally eradicate the vast fields of cannabis, as a result, half of the village burnt down as well, as the houses were mostly of wood. We could still see the burn marks on some of the houses in the village.

Geographical isolation, the tragic fire and the difficult history with the local authorities has made the locals suspicious of any outsiders. We were to experience this as well. After the bumpy car ride and an hour's ascent uphill, we reached the first houses of the village. Walking into the narrow lanes of a place that has gained a reputation of mythical proportions, the first impression was a something of an anticlimax. The general atmosphere in the village reminded me of a scene in the movie Deliverance, where Burt Reynolds and John Voight with their group enter a small hillbilly town in the Appalachian mountains – suspicious villagers were peeking out the eaves of their wooden houses, there was an air of hostility that could be sensed. Outsiders were clearly not welcome, except to buy the charas. Children in village, as anywhere in the world, were excited, friendly and curious, but the adults had historical baggage which explains their bland reception. Even the dogs seemed to be trained to bark at strangers. We met briefly a mixed group of drug tourists, a ragged bunch of israeli dreadheads, who told us not to touch anything. Outsiders are allowed to only walk through one lane in the village and touching of buildings or anything for that matter is punishable by a fine of 1000 rupees. The villagers themselves were extremely wary of not touching any outsiders. Whenever we would pass them on the narrow lanes, they would step aside and stand against the wall or some would even jump and scream, in fear of being touched by an outsider. I cannot help but wonder what the locals must think of foreigners, if the kind they are mostly exposed to are hippies in that are mostly interested in being stoned 24/7.

The village itself had clearly seen better days; heaps of garbage were lying everywhere and the place was in total squalor. As a side not, all the houses, however, had brand new TATA Sky satellite dishes, the wide world of Hindi soap operas and Bollywood was there to civilize the people. Illiteracy is a big problem in the village, health facilities are poor and the only cashcrop currently seems to be drug trade, from which organized crime takes the lion's share. Not a very solid basis for development. The village has now been integrated into the Indian electorate, roads are being built and the big hydro power project of the government of Himachal Pradesh has enabled electricity to the village, but also raised general awareness of the place, for better and for worse. The surrounding hills had been completely sripped down from trees due to construction, and the villagers had been prohibited to cut down anymore, which has made building and repairing of houses very difficult. Time will tell what the Malana people will make of all this hustle and bustle around them. Stories similar to theirs are abundant in India hell bent on modernizig the entire country.

The view from the hotel in Kasol, where we stayed during the trip.

The village of Malana in the background. The welcome sign was hardly set by the locals.

Women had to carry firewood to the village from far.

This man was reading a newspaper on a mountain cliff, the bare hills can be seen in the background.

A local house. It seemed that the men in the village spent their days  sitting on the porches of the houses doing nothing while the women in the village worked.

Piles of garbage were everywhere. With no  waste management, bags of crisps are hard to get rid of. 

The village had a very modest view.

Some of the facial features of the villagers were indeed quite different from the others in the surrounding area.

Mundane inequality

Few days ago, going to work in the rickshaw as usual, I was passing the entrance to the crammed alleyways of the Nizamuddin basti, the Muslim village, when I noticed that something had changed in the usual scenery: right next to the entrance had been erected a vast advertisement by Diesel Jeans. In a notably Muslim-dominated area, the ad featured several topless men and women wearing nothing but jeans looking jadedly at the passers by. Right below the ad there was a man taking an early morning shower with a garden hose, beside him were naked children playing and a woman trying to start a bonfire. The ad had been erected to a level where a regular pedestrian would not see it right away, as it was slightly above the head. It was designed to reach the glimpse of a person riding a vehicle, especially one where the driver would sit relatively high, such as an SUV. The nonchalant gaze of the mostly white models would never reach the beggars sitting below them, or even the paanwallah facing away from the board. The advertisement dominated their immediate surroundings, but served no purpose to them.

The extremities of Indian economic inequality never seem to cease to amaze the foreign traveller coming to India. Exposure to it is unavoidable and it sends any fresh-off-the-plane westerner on an instant guilt trip, while the Indian listens to the shocked foreigner's lament quietly, almost amused. ”Oh my god, the poverty is just shocking!”. 

For some, it's too much. A friend recalled an anecdote of a young girl who was staying at hers as a couch surfer armed with a suitcase full of sanitary products to give to poor people she would see on the streets. After a first few days she locked herself into the guestroom and sat there sobbing after having seen too many beggars to her liking. 

V.S.Naipaul summarized the weltschmerz of the westerner painfully accurately in his book "An Area of Darkness", a work written in 1964 has not lost a single bit of its relevance to this day:

"India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value; a thousand newcomers to the country before you have seen and said as you. And not only newcomers. Our own sons and daughters, when they return from Europe and America, have spoken in your very words. Do not think that your anger and contempt are marks of your sensitivity.

You might have seen more: the smiles on the faces of the begging children, that domestic group among the pavement sleepers waking in the cool Bombay morning, father, mother and baby in a trinity of love, so self contained that they are as private as if walls had separated them from you: it is your gaze that violates them, your sense of outrage that outrages them. You might have seen the boy sweeping his area of pavement, spreading his mat, lying down; exhaustion and undernourishment are in his tiny body and shrunken face, but lying flat on his back, oblivious of you and the thousands who walk past in the lane between sleepers' mats and house walls bright with advertisements and election slogans, oblivious of the warm, overbreathed air, he plays with a fatigued concentration with a tiny pistol in blue plastic. It is your surprise, your anger that denies him humanity.

But wait, stay for six months. The winter will bring fresh visitors. Their talk will also be of poverty; they too will show their anger. You will agree; but deep down there will be annoyance; it will seem to you then, too, that they are seeing only the obvious; and it will not please to find your sensibility so accurately parodied."

In other words, overly emotional accounts of encounters with poverty have the danger of carnevalizing and thus dehumanizing the poor, depicting them as some uniform group of people that dwell in their wretched existance with no prospects of a better life. After staying for a bit longer in India, something happens to you: Much to your surprise, you indeed find yourself bored of backpackers' teary-eyed accounts of their encounters with ”realities of life” during their Indian experience. It is an uneasy feeling and you do not forgive  yourself easily for feeling that way, but you begin to justify your newly discovered numbness to poverty as recognition of your own limitations as an individual. The legless woman shivering, wrapped in every rag she owns on a winter morning greets you as you pass her in the rickshaw every morning in the same intersection. The girl in her dirty and torn flowery dress taps on the darkened car windows. They all become your daily landscape.

As for the Indians listening to the cries of the foreigners, they have seen it all, maybe even too much. It is true that the economic reforms of early 90's have multiplied the size of the middle class and thus lifted a notable amount of people out of poverty and opened windows of opportunity beyond cultural barriers, such as in the case of Dalit entrepreneurs. However, for the more well-off of the Indian society, poverty still seems to remain an uncomfortable truth, an ugly stain in the shield of shining new India. For example last year Indian and foreign media channeled the public outrage when the Delhi authorities, with their idea of a "world class capital", were resorting to questionable measures while trying to hide the beggars from the international guests. The government may chastise its people of the situation by calling the state of affairs "a national shame", but the general middle class public seems to rather shut its eyes from the whole situation. Pavan K Varma for example, in his book "the Great Indian Middle Class", is rather hard on his countrymen:

"The poor have been around for so long that they have become a part of the accepted landscape. Since they refused to go away, and could not be got rid of, the only other alternative was to take as little notice of them as possible. This myopia has its advantages: the less one noticed, the less reason one had to be concerned about social obligations; and the less one saw, the less one needed to be distracted from the heady pursuit of one's own material salvation. To get on in the world one had to restrict one's canvas, where all the discordance of other people's needs and conditions was best shut out." 

" For the burgeoning and upwardly mobile middle class of India, such poverty has ceased to exist. It has ceased to exist, because it does not create in most of its members the slightest motivation to do something about it. Its existence is taken for granted. Its symptoms, which would revolt even the most sympathetic foreign observer, do not register any more. The general approach is to get on with one's life, to carve out a tiny island of well-being in a sea of deprivation"

Such a mindset may partly come from political disillusionment. Tepid interest in social reforms may partly be due to the fact that educated middle class Indians seem to have very little faith in politicians and government, whom they mostly regard as corrupt babus and gangsters. Unwilling to deal with such crowd, they remain more focused on minding their own business, beggars or no beggars.