Delhi

On our return to Delhi, we became part of the Comex-India camp at Rabindra Rangshala for 7 days. Too many people, too few facilities and security. Frayed tempers ensued.

Gordon's letters

Jim Lindsay's diary:

3 to 8 September
The Festival and life in the camp

Even Greg, never a man to let negativity cloud his view, had to admit in his later book that there had been "criticism about rowdyism, boorishness, and some administrative failures" at the Youth Festival that had started officially the day before, and that there was some basis for this even if "most of the reports were exaggerated".

Our view on the ground was inevitably different from his, and we were not at all happy. That is probably one of the reasons for the original diary for these days being written up shortly afterwards rather than day-by-day.

One problem from our point of view was that when we first arrived we had been a little bit spoiled as the honoured guests, and of course the majority of the participants had not turned up at that stage. When we came back the site was crowded and the facilities were stretched.

The organisers seem to have believed that in the spirit of Commonwealth unity participants from all the British and Indian universities would merge into one great mass of integrated humanity, and the half dozen occupants of any tent would be more or less randomly drawn from the body as a whole. Naturally this did not happen, and as far as we could see almost all the participants immediately formed their own enclaves. Most of the Edinburgh tents were together near the centre, although some were dispersed and a few people were still elsewhere in India. Sticking with one's friends is only human nature, and of course it was also sensible from the point of view of organisation, since we were involved in activities every day and a group leader trying to assemble the contingent or pass on an important message did not want to have to check 25 or more tents.

However the organisers were not pleased that this happened, and there were enough delegates with chips on their shoulders for complaints about racial prejudice and apartheid to hang in the air. It took a while for the atmosphere of reproach to dissipate.

There were issues about security as well. Although there were guards at the main gate and at the key transfer point between the tented village and the rest of the site, it turned out that the ones at the main gate were really only interested in checking vehicles and the ones inside the camp were said to be ready to look the other way in exchange for a few rupees or a packet of cigarettes. We all had identity badges, and countersigned cards that were supposed to bear photographs, but these were rudimentary. I know mine was not the only one not to have a photograph attached. It was not difficult for them to fall into the wrong hands and if they did, it would be very difficult to spot.

At a very early stage things began to disappear from tents and some of them were large or valuable. There was also a lot of petty theft and even clothes were disappearing from washing lines. It was said that most of the theft was being done by professionals who had bought their way in, but there were rumours that some of the pilfering was an internal affair. Since the tents could not be secured, valuables had to be carried on our persons or locked in the coach, but even that was a security risk, parked as it was on the main road and hidden from the tents by a high hedge.

To add a little colour to the situation, there was a rumour that a headless corpse had been found just outside the main gate one morning, and someone claimed to have seen the guards clubbing a huge snake to death up by the water tank.

The facilities did not stand up to the strain. Luckily the toilets did not fail, but the catering was a disaster. We were not fussy - we had put up with some very rough and ready meals on the way - but the endless queues and the quality of what one got after a long wait were not satisfactory. The contingents had paid a good deal up front to Comex India for our meal coupons. We were not very far from the centre of the city and there was a move to get this money back so that we could spend it in our own way. I think this was eventually achieved although someone else may remember more clearly.

The soft drinks, sweet stalls, and other catering concessions were all overpriced. This was no joke at a time when Exchange Control was in force and we were two months into a three-month trip for which we were officially supposed to have no more than £50 each. Even water tankers with fixed prices painted on them were charging more than double their advertised rate for a glass of water. Eventually complaints to the site commandant got some of these problems rectified but this really only worked for things with well-understood prices. The concessionaires complained that they had to raise their prices because they were being charged so much for the right to trade. We saw the number of visitors and the perpetual queues and did not believe them.

There was also some resistance to participating in the formal programme. We were given leaflets with lists of seminars and discussions on themes like "Youth in the world at present" and "Youth in the community" that we were meant to attend. We had put quite a lot of effort into our contacts at Jaipur and these had shown that we were going to give and get a lot more from making contact with individuals informally than from going to meetings, especially to discuss earnest themes that smacked of Sundays at the Youth Club. We had all seen events like this taken over by those who wanted to be heard without necessarily having anything to say. I think I took part in one of these seminars and that was enough. By all accounts they were never well attended.

However there was a three-line whip on a reception hosted by the freshly-appointed President Giri, for whom the best cultural treats like the Newcastle Rapper Dances were laid on. I don't think any of Edinburgh's cultural activities made it to performance in front of the great and the good or the microphone.

Even if we had cheerfully accepted mixed tents, eaten whatever we were given without complaint, tolerated our cameras and underwear being stolen, and taken part in laboured debates about Youth, there were bigger issues that were quite outside our control.

One was that the Festival had become a political football. My understanding (probably not at all accurate) was that when Comex India took over the organisation of the event, this caused great outrage in the Student Union of Delhi University, who had thought that they should be the hosts on the University's own campus. To add to the complications, there had just been a transfer of power in the Union so that there were outgoing and incoming cliques. As far as I knew the outgoing clique was allied to Comex India but the incoming Union leadership were very hostile and did their level best to disrupt the festival. A lot of the action was purely political but we also heard of dangerous ploys like small cars being pushed forward and left teetering on the edge of the auditorium while performances were going on.

The other issue was the sheer size of the crowds for some of the events. Estimates for some of the cultural events put audience figures up as high as 10,000 and even if this was over-optimistic, a lot of people passed through the site for these events. Inevitably crowds of this size were going to contain some professional criminals as well as people who could most politely be called exuberant, and equally inevitably the police did what came naturally and tried to control them with lathi charges. On the night of the biggest event of all some of us realised how vulnerable the coach was, since the whole crowd was going to stream past it twice, and we installed ourselves in it like a besieged garrison until the danger was past. At one point on the same night I walked down to the main gate to see the crowd coming in. The guards were trying to let no more than eight or ten through at a time but every so often the mob would surge forward and overwhelm them. People were swept forward and women wrapped in saris that gave them no chance to move freely were being pushed aside and landing face-first in the mud.

Most of our time was spent in camp, not usually doing anything very constructive, or in the centre. I had one very dreary day in camp with not much to do but read and very little money to spend, and the only things I could afford were little greenish bananas in batches of a dozen. At the end of the day I realised to my horror that I had bought 36 and eaten all but three of them - I gave the others to some other hungry soul. They had tasted very good and miraculously there were no after effects. At this time we were missing a number of people. Apart from the sick Tony, Johan and Liz, Kirsteen, Don W and Ricky were all off elsewhere, as were Liz B and Joanna. On the other hand we had welcomed in Sandra Grant, who took one of the spare spaces on the coach and fitted very naturally in as a full participant.

Tony is ill

Not long after we arrived Tony developed an intestinal illness more alarming than the one he had suffered earlier. After a stay in the camp sick bay he was transferred to a hospital in town but it seems to have been a horrific experience. He talked of being left lying in his underwear for hours, staff who spoke no English, and quite suddenly being discharged unwell and half-dressed. He found his way back to the Rangshala and Greg eventually found a place for him to convalesce, with one of his acquaintances in a suburb called South Extension 2.

The arrangement was that one of us was Tony's companion during the day, although some people may have stayed overnight. When Tony was first established in South Extension a group of us went out to see him and it was a real struggle to find the right address in South Extension. While we were asking directions a housewife who must have recognised the Comex coach from the newspapers offered us French Toast, and we were invited back for lunch on a later day. After Tony was settled the coach's main daily role was to ferry the daily companions back and forward. Other members tended to go into the centre by taxi or other means, and the coach would where possible meet them on its way back from South Extension in the evening at a pre-arranged rendezvous. The flat was on an upper storey at the edge of the new development and overlooked a wasteland of vegetation and a squalid-looking housing block that was probably due for demolition to make room for the next phase. On the day that I sat with Tony he was asleep most of the time and I was left to my own devices. It became quite cold and I got first hungry and then ravenous. It took forever for the day to finish. Only when the coach turned up did it turn up that I had been meant to call the little servant boy to make a meal for me. Others suffered worse. One day when several people were visiting it rained heavily and naturally there were lots of puddles. On the way back to Cuddles poor AS did not remember that one of these concealed the drainage ditch, and disappeared up to his waist.

In town

It is not surprising that we spent a lot of time in town. The coach went to South Extension daily to provide companions for the sick Tony, so what tended to happen was that people went into the centre in ones and two by taxi or other means, knowing that the coach would be there to collect them at the end of the day. The way back to the Rangshala seemed to be different every day, as though the landmarks were rearranged.

The traffic everywhere was a chaos of taxis and carts, bicycles and delivery three-wheelers, with pedestrians and the odd cow adding variety to the mixture. Every so often there would be someone making their way through the traffic stark naked, although our unpractised eyes could not tell whether they were Jain monks or simply disturbed.

The commercial heart of the town and inevitably the area where we spent most time was the ring of concentric streets through which the main shopping and entertainment streets radiated, with their cafes, restaurants, banks, travel offices and cinemas. The inmost circle was Connaught Place with the greenish space of Nehru Park inside it. Outside the Place was the bigger ring of Connaught Circus. The regular blocks created by the intersection of the circles and radials were all identified unimaginatively by letters from A to N, which were mounted on poles in front of them. The most important of the ten radials was Janpath, which headed due south and eventually crossed the ceremonial way of the governmental quarter. One day we found the elderly Comex I coaches, which had never made it back to Britain because of the outbreak of war, parked on a side-street nearby. They were being used for tourist trips or airport services.

Apart from the formal shops there were lots of stalls selling sweets, cigarettes, and other oddments, and barrows piled with old books. Janpath had a host of Tibetan stalls selling goods that supposedly had been brought out by refugees, although the impression was that for every genuine Tibetan spoon or brass ornament there were a couple knocked together locally. There were coin stalls too, some of them selling everything at a rupee. It was odd to see a British halfpenny on sale for a rupee next to something a good deal more exotic.

Strangely there were not very many beggars in the centre. The most common were little children holding even smaller ones in their arms. I don't know if the mutilated and sick ones were screened out of the high status areas.

At the southern edge of Connaught Place was the India Coffee House. It was a very dramatic place with a big sign overhead, ceiling fans whirling and lots of people at outdoor tables. After dark it was a blaze of light, which meant that every so often some enormous beetle would blunder in and land on someone's table. Children would catch big ones and come to wave them at the clientele. This was supposed to be the place for smart young people to meet, which may be why we waited ages to be served one evening and gave up in a huff. It was quite a good place for people running out of money to try to sell things like nylon shirts that were absurdly fashionable. We heard of people selling ancient shirts for rupee sums much higher than they had first paid for them. This was not much help to those of us who had heeded warnings not to take sweaty nylon with us. Whisky was the other strong selling line but it would have taken a lot of self-control to load our packs with it and keep it intact through the journey.

The Madras Café was one of my favourite places for lunch. It was upstairs on a corner site on the Place. They served big generous meals and they were cheap. My favourite was the onion uttapam, and anyone else who remembers it with affection might like to know that there are recipes on the Internet. Every so often men would wander in and through to the kitchen with firewood or other goods, and when the door swung open you could glimpse the naked upper part of a man doing something rhythmic. I was intrigued to know what he was doing. One day the door opened when I was standing close to it, and it turned out that he was sitting in a bath or tub pounding away. I think he might have been hulling a pile of rice he was sitting in, but after that I didn't care to look too close.

Sometimes in the evenings we treated ourselves to meals out. There was a Chinese restaurant called the Mikado (indeed) which was dark and cool although rather expensive. We went to the cinema too. There was an air-conditioned Odeon. I remember something with John Wayne as a heroic oilman and a comically serious film about the Siegfried and the Ring legend with a lot of bathing in dragon's blood.

The Standard Café was a quite expensive air-conditioned place to have snacks or coffee, accompanied by Indian and elderly English pop played very loud on the jukebox. It was a fascinating jukebox that solved the problem of turning records over by raising a second playing arm from beneath to play the B sides if required, When we were sitting there of an evening on a leathery sofa a pair of amorous rats appeared from nowhere leaping and biting in a playful way, then disappeared into the innards of an unoccupied sofa. The waiter caught our eyes and laughed. "Ah, they are in love" he said.

Car ownership at the time was very limited and we were told that even for motor scooters there was a waiting list months long for people who did not have money and influence. To fill the gap there were lots of taxis, mostly Morris Cowleys, and almost all of them driven by Sikhs. The meters worked on distance rather than time so crawling through the awful traffic was not expensive in itself, but unless watched drivers tended to take long circuitous routes and we had a few arguments with them.

Gordon and some of the rest of us made an expedition to a bank one day looking to get Sterling converted into rupees. Unlike a conventional bank we were not confined to a hall with cashiers hidden behind grilles. Instead there was a vast open plan hall full of men working at tables piled high with stacks of paper. The ceiling was a mass of fans so all the piles were crowned with paperweights and they were amazing adept at transferring papers between these without losing any. Eventually Gordon found the right functionary and was issued with a chit entitling him to draw money from a cash desk.

Every town had its contrasts but there can't be many where the differences over a few hundred yards were as sharp as in New Delhi then. It took only a few minutes to travel from the formal grandeur of administrative Delhi and the Connaught Place area to the cramped streets of Old Delhi. Old Delhi was a mass of little rickety shops selling food and drink, clothes, and an endless variety of car and bike parts. At night the shops were closed but life was still lived on the streets. People walked or sat, and there were men sleeping on charpoys on the pavement. There were formidable looking street toilets. Out in the suburbs where these were not common there seemed to be men peeing into ditches or against trees at any time of day or night.

One night I navigated us back to the Rangshala by the wrong road and we found ourselves in the middle of the crowd coming out of a temple ceremony. They were good-natured as we inched our way forward but it would not have taken a lot for the mood to transform itself.

"The best laid plans...." by Liz Y

Rabindra Rangshala was where we first encountered the monsoon rain. Roz and, I think, Dave had been to India before, but for most of us, this warm, teeming downpour was a new experience. We had arrived the previous evening at the end of our long, hot, dusty journey and it felt quite exhilarating to be drenched in this torrent of rain. As travellers we take home a patchwork of memories. It was here too that we saw a row of black-feathered vultures perched on a washroom roof. Perhaps not reassuring to anyone worse for wear after six weeks on the road, but these much-maligned scavengers were fascinating, sort of nature's guardians of public health. They played an important role in India, disposing of rotting carrion in towns and cities. Sadly vultures face extinction in India today.

The word 'rangshala' means 'theatre' in Hindi. Rabindra Rangshala was a large amphitheatre, recently built in the 1960s. It was commissioned in Nehru's time and dedicated to the memory of the great poet and writer, Rabindranath Tagore, who taught that the common bonds linking all of humanity are greater than any constraints of nation or culture. Rabindra Rangshala must have been chosen as an ideal setting for the Comex festival.

At a reception in Delhi soon after we arrived, some of the student hosts wore coloured threads around their wrists. One of them explained about the Hindu festival of Rakshabandhan, when sisters tie coloured threads called rakhi around the wrists of their brothers as a symbol of the protective bond between them. Since then I have learned that rakhi are sometimes given to other people as a token of unity and support, and how Rabindranath Tagore inspired Hindus and Muslims to exchange rakhi when the colonial government sought to partition Bengal in 1905.

The turn of events at Rabindra Rangshala has already been described in the log. With 1,000 Indian and UK campers, it was crowded at the campsite and some of the group decamped for a time to explore elsewhere. None of us were ever anonymous tourists in Delhi. When things began to go awry at the camp, even those off-site were quick to hear about it. Hints of riots and burning tents inevitably grab headlines. Reports appeared in Indian newspapers and speculative rumours abounded in the cafes and little restaurants around Connaught Place. These were lively places, like cafes in Lahore, where people met to chat and mull over news of the day. People were always friendly to us, but after the turmoil at the camp, we came under a bit of critical scrutiny, e.g. there was the nylon shirt issue. Why would anyone from the wealthy West sell his shirt?

Apart from all this, there was possibly some cultural confusion. People were interested to meet us. One person in a cafe said that he and his friends had tried to talk to a few Comexers, but found the conversation a bit disappointing. Hopefully we did something to change that. A group of us got to know him quite well and were even welcomed as visitors to his home. The post-colonial Republic of India had come into being only two decades earlier. People were hopeful of change for the better and many eagerly debated all sorts of issues like economic development, improved living standards, education, international relations and the place of India in the World. These were not really party-political discussions as they so often turned out to be in Britain.

Problems with crowd control, site access and organization seem to have led to the chaotic scenes at the camp, but none of this should overshadow the positive aims and intentions of Comex. It is good to know that over the ensuing decades the theatre became an iconic cultural venue. Today, however, Rabindra Rangshala lies abandoned and derelict, hidden in the depths of the forest which has grown up around it. In the mid 1990s, the site was designated part of a green conservation area vital to offset a crisis of pollution in modern Delhi. The decision to close the theatre was challenged unsuccessfully all the way to the Supreme Court and theatrical events have had to be staged elsewhere. Musical events are sometimes held in the vast Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, built in the 1980s.

There is now restricted access to the Rabindra Rangshala site and young people talk of the theatre as a place of mystery, haunted by dreams of the past. We Comexers were once a small part of those dreams.