Jaipur

We stayed as guests of Jaipur University for 8 days. We were given a seriously busy program of events - Gordon's letters will give you an insight into how hectic it was.

Some notes from Alastair Smith:
The gentleman who arranged our accommodation at Jaipur was Dr Suresh C Goel. He was studying for his PhD in Zoology and was in the same student house as myself, (and Don C, & Ricky, but a year later after he had left.)

One of my memories of our time in India, is that Fay got totally pissed off with us all and left us for a few days on her own, or should I say, a few days with Suresh. (This may be a very distorted memory).

Memories of Jaipur.:

Visit to Amber Palace.
Visit to Albert Hall Museum.
Visit to Coca Cola bottling plant
Dinner with a family that ran a school, and a wee drive in the father's Austin Ruby motor car the next(?) day. He was really a frustrated engineer and was very interested in Cuddle's coachwork
Liz B, slamming the Cuddles' door while A and I were working on her (the bus) causing it to fall off the jack, bending the jack's column. (I seem to recall how pleased A & I were)
A small number of us having dinner with a priest from St Xavier's and travelling on a rickshaw to get there.
A visit to the Mahareena's college, where we put on a wee concert, and they fed us on with chips. This was followed on a later day with a picnic with some of the girl students. Some of us were also interviewed by A.I.R. but I cannot remember where or when. (At the request of a member of staff I sent some books from Britain, but never received an acknowledgement.)

Jim Lindsay's diary:

26 August

This day set the pattern for the rest of our stay. After breakfast in the dining room we would be booked by one of the colleges during the morning. Lunch would be at the college or back in the dining room, and then there would be more college visiting in the afternoon. After our evening meal, if there was not a cultural programme we would lounge around the guest house or talk with our new friends.

We were presumably a prize and the colleges fought for us quite aggressively. There seemed to be colleges turning out engineers, doctors, and lawyers, colleges for poor and village boys, and colleges for young ladies whose degrees would determine their marriage prospects. These ones specialised in displays of traditional culture and were run by gorgons - for the bolder girls sneaking out in the evenings to coffee houses seemed to be the ultimate in sin.

Today's morning event was at St Xavier's Catholic college, and then our hosts for the day took us to a magnificently disorganised museum which, like practically everything in Jaipur was in a converted palace. Apart from the inevitable Gandhi section it had an amazing number of miscellaneous collections with almost no labels or information.

In the afternoon we were lined up on the stage in the hall of the Commercial College facing tiered rows of students and subjected to a barrage of questions, not all of them particularly friendly. After that was ordeal by conversation, with the added feature that a great many students pressed notebooks into our hands so that we could give them our names and addresses for penpal purposes. As far as I know none of them ever wrote, and I wonder if the aim was really to get prestige by collecting more names than anyone else. One boy told me his father had an MBE but could not get the ribbon in India, and when I got back could I get some for him? I still sometimes feel guilty about not following this up.

We had the evening to ourselves and the laundry service took away our used clothes and brought them back immaculately cleaned and pressed.

27 August

Jaipur is full of palaces and most of them are pink. Not surprisingly they call it the city of palaces or the pink city, but not apparently the city of pink palaces. Today we went sightseeing to Amber Fort and Palace, which is a lot less pink than most. Many of its buildings are wonderfully and lavishly decorated, with ramparts looking out over the lake and hills. We visited a temple to Siva where we had to shed every leather item, and then had very sedate elephant rides. After that we went back into town and almost visited the City Palace, which was properly pink as it should be, but got no further than the tea room in the gatehouse.

We had a thali lunch at a college for poor students. It was very Spartan, with dormitories rather like cycle sheds. Because this was a boys' college we then got the male cultural offering, which meant a performance of lugubrious tenor ballads and humorous Rajasthani songs including one about having hiccups. After this we got our own back with treats like Westering Home and the Skye Boat Song. This was in a meeting hall with sparrows nesting behind the class pictures. After that we went to Gandhi Bhawan for a discussion over bananas with the Socialist Group on Gandhi and Social Change, and then a school for the children of university staff.

For the evening we changed into our formal dress - which meant kilts for us men - and went to one of the girls' hostels where more cultural treats were exchanged, including some bagpipes from Brian and Lara's Theme from Gordon and a very bad Gay Gordons. The girls were a mischievous lot and tried to get us to ask their formidable chaperones to dance. They inspected our coach and were greatly taken with the festoons of toilet rolls. This event was actually a lot of fun and finished after midnight.

28 August

Today started with a discussion at the Law Faculty, not a bright prospect. These meetings always took a long time to get over the awkward introductory stage, but in this case it helped that the director was a man with charisma.

One problem of the University being in rather a nice part of town was that there were very few shops or cafes, but Gordon and I did find one where we discussed life with a Sikh over Fantas.

There was meant to be another discussion in the afternoon but it was cancelled for some reason. We looked forward to some rest time, but choir rehearsals took most of it, since we had an important event to prepare for.

This was the Governor's Reception. It was a grand occasion in the old British Governor's Residence and it was very much in the spirit of the Raj. We were arranged on rows of chairs in the formal garden, surrounded by topiary and peacocks and mixing rather uneasily with the stratum of Jaipur society that was used to being invited to events like this. There were servants in long white coats and scarlet turbans and a splendid uniformed brass band tucked behind a hedge playing old stalwarts like Colonel Bogie and Roll out the Barrel interspersed with Indian tunes. Eventually the Governor appeared and strolled along the rows making desultory conversation, and after this formal part finished we dived on the tables of nibbles.

In the evening some of us went to Suresh's student flat. Suresh was a post-grad who had lived in Moncrieff House in Edinburgh so he knew some of the contingent already. There were lizards but no insects (maybe the lizards had eaten them all) and someone had made some chilli savouries so hot that not even our hosts could cope with them. There was chatter and music, and the nostalgic sight of bookshelves full of paperbacks from Thin's.

29 August

This was officially a free morning, so Gordon and Alison and I went into town on a rickshaw. The five rupees (about 20p) we paid was apparently too much but I think the rickshaw cyclist earned his money since there were three of us and it was not on the flat. I was told later that most shops and service providers operated an informal charging scale in which all foreigners paid more and of course the Americans were expected to pay most. We shopped for souvenirs and admired sari cloth and other things we could not afford. I bought a couple of school-type exercise books which I still have, complete with useful conversion tables between chhataks and grams and seers and kilos.

After lunch we were at the Arts Faculty of Rajasthan College, and there were genuinely interesting people to talk to and a lot more fun with the cultural exchanges than there usually was. We were offered coke and odd biscuits called Saltos that we met at other events - they were salty as the name suggests but had an aftertaste it was difficult to pin down. After that there was yet another reception at Kanoria College, where girls performed things like the "Dance of the Fisherfolk" and we got revenge with singing and Gordon's mandolin and country dancing. There is a note in the original diary about a dog and the principal's handbag. It must have been something entertaining but I can't now remember what happened, so if anyone has a better memory of this…

30 August

The Science Faculty this morning. We had a look round and then a discussion over more coke and Saltos. After that off we went to Maharani's College, which was the female equivalent but in a very traditional way put more emphasis on "home science". Here we got samosas as well as coke and Saltos, so they must have been showing off their skills. They gave us garlands of marigolds too. After that I met a couple of men from Rajasthan College and we talked about a range of things from mangos to swinging London. They invited me to the Polo Bar, which was not so much the place where students met as the place that students would like to go if someone with money was coming with them. The contingent had already paid it a visit and found it full of photos of ancient polo teams from the days when the Maharajahs still lived in it.

After lunch the inevitable reception was for senior people in colleges and hostels, but there were interesting people like Freddy Stevenson, a Malay medical post-grad who had been at Suresh's flat. Every so often it rained suddenly and we had to dive for cover.

As for the evening, we were back at Maharani's College, where we were welcomed with a tilaka on everyone's brow. Don C was the hero of the hour, repairing their tangled electrical system ahead of the performances. I remember a very lively and comely girl called Prabha who was from the Kenyan Indian business caste and found life in Jaipur rather staid. She had a wicked way with her and stole Jim Moyes' shoes. As usual there was a row of matrons sitting glaring at the action and making sure that shoe theft or worse did not happen.

31 August

Unwell in the night. At the event the night before we had all been given pan, but no instructions on what to do with it, except that we knew not to spit the red juice on the floor. It must have disagreed with me. I hung around the guesthouse feeling queasy and thus missed a nice lunch which some well-to-do Jaipurian had offered to the contingent.

To compensate I caught up with some students who had been at a meeting of the Foreign Students' Association. They included Freddy Stevenson and a very intense Dutchman called Hans Borkhaerts, who was taking a four-year Sanskrit course prior to getting really stuck into the study of Indian religion.

We were still talking when the time came to visit Vivekanand College, so Freddy and Hans came along and lapped up the cultural performances.

Back at the Guest House after this reception Freddy introduced us to Mrs Valentina, a lugubrious square Russian lady living in the suite directly below mine. Freddy, Hans, Mrs Valentina, John Covell and I set off in autorickshaws for the Rambagh Palace Hotel, home of the Polo Bar. The Polo had closed for the night but they served us pilsner out on the lawn. Mrs Valentina was the University's Russian language lecturer, and she was living in the guesthouse because of some complicated issue involving having central heating installed in her university flat. It seemed very odd - maybe she meant air conditioning. She was a great royalty snob and waxed lyrical about the handsomeness of Lord Mountbatten and less than lyrical about the appearance of the local Maharani. I think she was disappointed that there were no princes on Comex. As they gradually turned off the lights in the hotel, the conversation covered the price of food, service on Aeroflot, the Indian telephone service, and how much profit the Maharaja made running his palace as a hotel that was nearly empty every summer.

I got a lift back in somebody's Morris 8. There was an Edinburgh/Glasgow banana party going on but I made my excuses and went to bed.

1 September

This was our last full day in Jaipur.

I had a restful morning while many of the others were at Maharani's College giving Scottish dancing lessons. They were apparently given plates of chips as a reward. The women's' colleges were very competitive and they were evidently put under a lot of pressure from Kanoria College to give them lessons as well. It must have been fun being in such demand.

John Covell and I went round to Freddy's in an autorickshaw in the late afternoon for tea and cake on the roof with Hans. Hindi conversations floated up to us from peasants cycling past the house. We talked about the sliding scale of overcharging that shopkeepers inflicted on different types of foreigner, and laughed at the idea of Mrs Valentina heading off to the Polo to spend a solitary evening in hope of seeing the Maharani. Afterwards we went on to a party held by somebody called Arun, where there were bananas and rum and I suffered indigestion.

I was sorry to leave Jaipur but I kept in touch with Freddy for some years and he came to visit me in England. The last I heard, he was a radiologist in Germany.

A visit to the cinema in Jaipur by Liz Y

One evening at Suresh's place, I got talking to D, the wife of one of Suresh's post-grad friends. D began to describe stories from Hindu mythology, such as those of Rama and Sita in the ancient Sanskrit epic of the Ramayana. Although these myths and legends had a surreal, dreamlike quality, they seemed to reveal a lot about how people in India looked at life.

D suggested that it would be a revelation for me to see an Indian film with an Indian audience and it was arranged that a little group of us go to the local cinema. The film would be in Hindi and D undertook to translate for me. The cinema was extremely popular in India and the films of Bollywood were a thriving industry. Television services were unavailable in most parts of India in 1969.

The cinema auditorium was filling up when we arrived. There were whole families with children and D and her husband had brought their baby. We had upstairs seats in the circle. The atmosphere was party-like and people chatted in anticipation.

The film was a musical melodrama, a story of love and loss in which emotions ran high and were accentuated as the protagonists faced life-changing decisions and moral dilemmas. A common theme in stories from both East and West is that of separation and unrequited love. In this story two young people who long to be together are forced by circumstances to be apart. The young man has to go on a journey to a faraway place and there is no news of his return. Meanwhile the young woman is persuaded by her family to marry a wicked, rich landowner.

The cinema-goers reacted to the scenes in the film as though they themselves were part of the story. People discussed what the actors should do at each point, what was right, what was wrong. If emotions ran high on screen, emotions amongst the audience ran high. All this was orchestrated and encouraged with haunting music and songs. During the performance, people with babies walked them up and down the aisles. Interruptions and a hum of chatter were all acceptable. D whispered a translation to me as the story unfolded.

In the course of time the landowner is killed by one of his many enemies and the young woman is left a widow. Her yearned-for lover at last returns from his journey. This was a tense moment. What should the young couple do? To a Western audience the answer would seem obvious. The lovers could finally be united and live happily ever after. To an Indian audience, the morally right solution was that the young widow should remain true to her dead husband for the rest of her life.

There was a moment of hushed silence as the audience waited to see what would happen. This was the cliff-hanger climax to the film. Then came the solution, the best outcome the audience could hope for. The young widow took the heart-wrenching decision that her honourable duty was to remain faithful to her deceased husband, no matter how dreadful he had been. She proposed that the man she loved should marry her younger sister.

The cinema-goers clapped and cheered, obviously happy that right had been done. A good Indian ending perhaps, but not for someone like me with a Western mindset. I could only see the destiny of this young woman as a tragedy.

After the film we emerged into the late afternoon sunlight and the mood engendered by the film lifted. It had been a fascinating afternoon and a lesson on how human passions are tempered by differing traditions and values, as they shape the choices we make and our fate in life.

Young people like us by Liz Y

When I think of the students who welcomed us in India, I remember the fragrance of flowers, the aromatic garlands of pink frangipani given to us in Jaipur, the heady scent of jasmine at an informal reception in Delhi. The latter was early in our stay at Rabindra Rangshala before things at the camp became so chaotic. I was one of the group who left for a time to travel further afield and didn't experience some of the problems described by Jim L and Gordon. I rejoined the contingent in Jaipur.

In contrast to our rather scruffy appearance after our long journey, the Delhi students were beautifully attired in crisp cotton. Some of the young men wore colourful turbans. These students were open, friendly and interested in how young people lived in the West. They showed little of the existential doubt prevalent in our changing culture of the sixties. The venue was in a central area of New Delhi at some distance from the campsite. Engrossed in conversation, I somehow got separated from other Comexers, who returned to camp without me. The host students helped me to get back.

The young women, whom we met at the University Guest House in Jaipur, were the students I came to know best. These girls were lively, spontaneous and curious about our lives. It was fascinating to talk to them. From our perspective they led quite sheltered lives, used to being chaperoned on social occasions. I felt they had retained something which girls in the West had to rein in as we became teenagers. We lived more independently than these girls and had to develop a sort of invisible shield, to become more self-aware.

The Jaipur girls figured that life must be very difficult for us. They reasoned that while they themselves were protected by their parents even in adulthood, Western girls were more or less abandoned, pushed out of their childhood homes, to fend for themselves. How could we find husbands on our own? Weren't there great risks of making unsuitable choices. For our part we were curious about the custom of arranged marriages. Would we really want our parents to choose husbands for us? The Jaipur girls believed that parental love was enough to ensure good partners would be found for them.

These views had been put to me more forcefully by an older Pakistani student in Edinburgh. She resented what she saw as a Western sense of superiority over cultures which practiced arranged marriages. In her view many Western women were made insecure even neurotic because of the pressure on them to make their way independently in life. There was also a suggestion that young people in the East could better focus on their studies in the safe knowledge that their families would find suitable partners when the time came.

After one of the college events in Jaipur where a group of us was lined up on stage to be asked questions by a room full of young male students, I was invited by the professor of sociology to visit him and his family in their home. This proved a very pleasant occasion. His wife served little bowls of Indian delicacies while their fourteen year old daughter played for me on the sitar. The professor was interested in the reported cultural changes in Western societies during the 1960s and the challenges by young people to established values. How did all of this impact on our lives? Weren't there risks for young people particularly girls in the rejection of traditional ways of life? He also described how Indian people were puzzled by the hippie movement and its preoccupation with Indian mysticism. It was felt that hippies had misconceptions about Indian culture.

In all these encounters, I found friendship and a mutual interest in our experiences and ways of life. We lived in different parts of the world, but like distant cousins were linked by a shared history albeit under the cloud of a colonial past.