The Cultural Traveller

In February, I converted credit card points, unused for years, into gift vouchers of a hotel chain. In total, it had a value of about ₹ 20,000. This, I assumed, would lead to at least two, if not three, nights. My marker had been what five-star hotel tariffs in Mumbai had been at the time. At the best of them, rooms were sometimes going for as low as ₹ 5,000. This May, as the three-month deadline for the expiry of the vouchers approached, I went to the app and saw prices that were higher than even before the pandemic. The lowest category room in Mumbai was upwards of ₹ 12,000 and that was if you booked a few weeks in advance. Add taxes, and I would be able to squeeze in a night. Hotel rates are directly proportional to demand and demand is a one-to-one correlation with travel. People stop travelling, hotel tariffs nosedive. And if the prices are taking flight into outer space, the signs are clear. Indians are on the move again and that was not really good news for people holding gift vouchers of five-star hotels.

In August 2019, before the pandemic, I went for a Vipassana retreat in Kutch. After the 10 days of silence, I found myself sightseeing. I was going through the Rann of Kutch, white gleaming marshes caked with salt and a lonely road that stretched endlessly and then up onto Kalo Dungar from where the desert expands away into Pakistan

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Airbnb, the company that rules the global home stay market, has just released its quarterly numbers. They were up 70 per cent in revenues over last year and this is despite the war in Ukraine. Two years ago, I remembered taking a flight to Kerala after the total lockdown had been relaxed and the airport being like a desert, people in there scattered like nomads separated by vast empty spaces. Last month when I took a flight back to Mumbai from Coimbatore, a late night one, it was like a Mumbai local train. If the airline had allowed standing, I could picture a few dangling outside the door too, just like the Churchgate local.
A collective pent-up claustrophobia is being expended. More Covid variants might still bring twists to this happy ending but, for the moment, the psychological state of siege has been broken. And to travel is a compulsive instinct in humans, given enough opportunity. In earlier times, discount trade or war, travel mostly went under the garb of religion because that was the overarching theme of existence. You didn’t travel for travel’s sake in societies without surplus; religion was the excuse for it. I remember speaking to one of my late grandfather’s friends from an illustrious family in Kerala and him reminiscing about his childhood when people dropped in at his home on their way to Kashi, a trip that took them months. Even now, for a large number of Indians, religion is their means to explore new places and experience the value that it adds to the ordinariness of life.

IN AUGUST 2019, before the pandemic, I went for a Vipassana retreat in Kutch. For an atheist, meditation is the closest that one will come to a religious experience and even then one has to sift the irrationality out and think of it as a refinement of the brain. Having completed the 10 days of silence, I found myself, what else, sightseeing. I was going through the Rann of Kutch, white gleaming marshes caked with salt and a lonely road that stretched endlessly, as if to nowhere, and then up onto Kalo Dungar, the Black Hill that isn’t really black, from where the desert expands away into far and beyond Pakistan. In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s great novel, Saleem Sinai, the protagonist, looks at such a sight as a boy in puberty and his imaginations are cut short by the pain of adulthood: “I stared through the heat-haze at the Rann. The Rann of Kutch… I’d always thought it a magical name, and half-feared-half-longed to visit the place, that chameleon area which was land for half the year and sea for the other half, and on which, it was said, the receding ocean would abandon all manner of fabulous debris, such as treasure-chests, white ghostly jellyfish, and even the occasional gasping, freak-legendary figure of a merman. Gazing for the first time upon this amphibian terrain, this bog of nightmare, I should have felt excited; but the heat and recent events were weighing me down; my upper lip was still childishly wet with nose-goo, but I felt oppressed by a feeling of having moved directly from an overlong and dribbling childhood into a premature (though still leaky) old age. My voice had deepened; I had been forced to start shaving, and my face was spotted with blood where the razor had sliced off the heads of pimples…”

If the prices are taking flight into outer space, the signs are clear. Indians are on the move again and that is not really good news for people holding gift vouchers of five-star hotels. A collective claustrophobia is being expended. More Covid variants might still bring twists to this happy ending but, for the moment, the psychological state of siege has been broken

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Some days later I was at the Rann of Kutch again but this time going over it from a different end, where its miasma of heat unfurled at the horizon on both sides as we sped to the island of Khadir ahead. It was here, 130 kilometres from Bhuj, that Dholavira, one of the arms of the Indus Valley Civilisation, had breathed. There are ruins of what was once a meticulously thought-out town. Grass and stone have developed a cosy companionship. There are rumps of houses and remnants of channels and a central path and mounds that are still to be excavated fully. It doesn’t look anything as large as a town by today’s measure. It would be no more than a housing colony. But we are talking 4,000 years ago. Also, what I see is where the elite lived, the area of the citadel. Outside the walls, there was the middle town and then further away, a lower town—cascading rungs where people found space according to how low they were on the social scale. And it is no coincidence if it even reminds you of cities of today, where the centre has the rulers and bluebloods, the suburbs become increasingly middle class and slums bigger the farther you go. Not much has changed in the master formula of ordering society.

And then a few months after Dholavira, the virus came into being, for a while the only traveller as humans fenced themselves into isolation. When I went to Kerala for the first time after Covid struck, there was a pass that had to be compulsorily filled online with details that included the panchayat ward where I would be staying. At the airport they wrote down the details again. I had to remain in quarantine for two weeks and every second day I would get a call from the local health worker to check that I was not infected and from the police station to make sure that I wasn’t gallivanting around. The second time I went to Kerala, they looked at the pass at the airport, took the details but there were no follow-up calls to check up on me. And the next time, I still had to fill the pass but now there was no one even checking it. It was as if with every trip I was making I could see the layers of fear being peeled away. Towards the end of last year that fear had loosened up almost entirely.

It is no coincidence if Dholavira reminds you of cities of today, where the centre has the rulers and bluebloods, the suburbs become increasingly middle class and slums bigger the farther you go. Not much has changed in the master formula of ordering society. A few months after my visit to Dholavira, the virus came, for a while the only traveller as humans fenced themselves in

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I had gone to Rajgir in Bihar, once upon a time the capital of the very first empire of India, Magadha, in the sixth century BCE. It was the seed of India itself as a potential unified whole. I climbed the mountains that jump up to run parallel, making it a natural impenetrable fortress, a reason why it became what it did. From the height I looked at the valley before me and, like Dholavira, the scale or the absence of it surprised me. I had read a book on old city forts of India and estimated from it that Rajgir would have a population of around a lakh at the most and so small in area that you could easily walk it in a short while. Yet, this was from where much of north India had been subjugated once upon a time. The capital shifted to Pataliputra and Rajgir went into disrepair. In the fourth century CE, when the Chinese monk Faxian had come to India, Rajgir was one of his stops and he had, in his A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, described it thus: “…one enters a valley, and comes to a circular space formed by five hills, which stand all round it, and have the appearance of the suburban wall of a city. Here was the old city of king Bimbisara; from east to west about five or six le, and from north to south seven or eight.” He then talks about a number of landmarks related to the time of the Buddha, ending with: “[These places] are still there as of old, but inside the city all is emptiness and desolation; no man dwells in it.” Around me, I saw many who had come to soak in the place, unafraid of Covid and no longer suspicious of the stranger next to them, making the valley come alive with their sounds, snatching a place back from oblivion.

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

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