India: Sins of the fathers

The Golden Temple at Amritsar. Photo / Getty Images

Exotic preconceptions perish when faced with the reality of India, writes Lynley Tulloch

India has captured the romantic and economic imaginings of the British since the days of imperialism. The British fascination with what was once called "the jewel in the crown of the British Empire" has not lost its shine. It has sparked films such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a story of elderly people coming home to a country that was never theirs to begin with. From verandas and pyjamas to cigars and colonial nostalgia, the British just can't let go.

As a descendent of the British, I have inherited this collective obsession. I always imagined visiting India.

I conjured up in my mind an exotic land with vast and expansive skies in various shades of purple. And so I took a journey there.

Maybe now I wish my imaginings had never reached my feet, and that my being hadn't trailed the dusty Indian earth. But that is the trouble with those who restlessly seek. They will always find — just not, perhaps, what they expected.

In Amritsar, I saw the sun hanging suspended in a deep mauve sky. It reminded me of a red fireball that had paused in its purposeful climb for a moment to witness the morning.
Gently, the crows circled the Golden Temple's sparkling holy waters in which people bathed — the depth beneath them murky and unknown.

The Golden Temple was one of our last stops on a frantic tour of north-western India. The queue to the inside of the temple was long, and building steadily. The brilliant sheen of the temple's domes winked in brief flashes on the water. As the sky lightened, the booming chant succumbed to a dignified morning prayer. The woman in front of me slumped suddenly and the others folded around her like a flower closing in on itself. Knees and bags pressed on my lower back, a steady and uncomfortable pressure.

I swallowed my panic at this loss of room, like an uncomfortable insect caught in a world much bigger and harsher than myself. It threatened to swallow me whole. As my breath came in short gasps I forced myself to look again at the sun, now having resumed its climb.

The expansiveness of the sky and water took me back to my homeland and out of my cramped and fearful body.

Judi Dench in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Photo / Supplied

Amritsar is a place of historical horror and holy Sikhs. The British massacred at least 379 unarmed peaceful Sikh demonstrators meeting at Jallianwala Bagh, a city park. Amritsar had recently come under the rule of British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, who had banned all public meetings in fear of an uprising. Dyer had made his troops continue shooting until their artillery was exhausted.

We visited this park and saw the bullet holes from where flesh had been torn and lives ended.

I cannot look India in the eye when I know of the historical bloodbaths and destruction
of my forebears.

I felt heavy that day with the burden of my ancestors' treachery. I visited the well that many of the desperate had climbed down to escape the bullets.

The park was planted with hedge shrubs shaped into British soldiers with guns. What the British did will not be forgotten.

And then on to Delhi, where we swarmed the many and dusty streets. We were a group of gawping tourists on the body of a heaving and tumultuous land.

I felt like a flightless vulture, or a huge parasite that could not find its feet. India always seemed to be moving and we could never have been able to pin down her essence.

Chandi Chowk market in Old Delhi. Photo / Getty Images

We had sat in faded restaurants that were steeped in spices, ignored desperate beggars, and traversed the scars of immense poverty. We gazed and gazed and yet India refused to look back at us. She could never look us in the eyes. It was as if she shunned us.

The Delhi streets regularly ruptured to spew rubbish and sewage amid the dirt. Pigs rooted in the edges of the filth and goats stood shackled in crumbly huts. Cows lumbered among the remnants of consumerism, chewing and swallowing plastic bags.

A child ran up to me, eyes shining with the promise of life and held her hand out. I could only offer her my pit of despair. She returned a joyful laugh, her life blending seamlessly into the streets of which I could never be part.

It seems somehow, that as a descendant of the British I have no place, and no right, to be in India. I cannot look India in the eye when I know of the historical bloodbaths and destruction of my forebears. Poverty, child-labour, ill health, illiteracy, animal abuse and malnutrition are part of the fabric of post-colonial life.

But nobody talks about that. It remains a land of unfulfilled promises and violet secrets.