The Many Faces of India
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Jeff Shumlin's wife, Evie Lovett, has had many experiences in India since befriending William Bissell many years ago at Wesleyan University.  William is Putney's main contact for all programs in India.  Jeff and Evie attended his wedding to Anjali Kapur in New Delhi some years ago (a 10 day event!), and they remain close friends.  After a recent visit to William and Anjali in New Delhi, Evie also revisited Rajasthan, where our Putney community service program lives and works, and sent back this travelogue from the castle where the group is lodged during the program.

I am sitting three stories up on the balcony of a palace, having ginger and milk-laced tea with the Maharani of Ghanerao, in the state of Rajasthan in India.  She is 73 but looks younger, most likely a result of 40 years spent within the confines of the women’s quarters of the castle, where contact with any man except her husband, father-in-law, and sons was forbidden.  We chat about her granddaughter who works in the securities industry in Manhattan.  She describes her own upbringing: betrothed to the Maharaja at age 13, she finished college before marrying.  We touch on the possibility of the Putney group working at a new school started in Ghanerao for tribal girls, who have no access to education.  She says she feels isolated; though she recently got a computer, she doesn’t yet know how to use the internet, since the boy who came to instruct her was too respectful of her status as Maharani to sit on a chair beside her.  She tells me that in 1995 she was asked to run for a local congressional seat.  She came out of “purdah”, or seclusion, to run, won handily, and served five years as the local representative until her husband had a stroke and she felt she needed to be with him.

Her home, the palace of Ghanerao, is home to the Putney group during its time in Rajasthan.  She says to me: “Each year I talk to them, but I wonder, do they really want to know about my life?”  “YES, YES, YES”, I say (and if they don’t, they’re crazy; she is fascinating and funny and wonderfully relaxed for…yes, a princess).

Rajasthan is my favorite place in India.  It’s harshly beautiful terrain: brown, arid, with the Aravalli Hills dotting the horizon.  There’s something about desert landscape that’s particularly conducive to romance, epoch storytelling, drama:  I can visualize those Rajput warriors sweeping over the hills, guarding to the death the craggy fort of Kumbalgarh, with its 35 kilometer wall.  The old well we visit was carved out and created in the 10^th century.  People live much as they did centuries ago; during a walk around the village of Ghanerao one morning, I see the street where the Brahmins live, who look after the temple.  Another area is the enclave of the silver artisans.  Next door are the leather shoemakers.  Further on, the potters.

I’m a photographer who works in black and white, but here I shoot color.  When you sweep your eyes across the landscape, you see brown, brown, more brown, then the flash of a red turban or fluorescent pink sari.  Houses are often a cool blue to offset the heat.  Buses are outrageously painted and decorated.  Shocking pink, lime green, and yellow kites fly overhead.  Men dress in white with brightly colored turbans.  The color indicates their profession or status: red for herders and shepherds, orange for shoemakers.  Each mustache is larger than the one before.  Women, barefoot, with chunky silver anklets, carry water or long piles of wood on their heads.

At the Fabindia School, where the Putney group spends much of their time, they have put on a dance performance for me.  The girls, normally dressed in sober uniforms, are decked out in traditional Rajasthani clothes, bangles, and makeup.  They dance a mesmerizing, sinuous dance and I think back to my walk of the morning and the homes these children have come from.  Here’s the crazy juxtaposition of rural India; people live the way their families have been living for centuries, they worship the same gods, they eat the same food, the fathers and mothers do the jobs done by their great-grandparents.  Their ten-year old daughter knows the traditional dances, but she is also fluent in English, uses the internet for research projects, and talks about her future as an engineer. In India, tradition and ambition aren’t mutually exclusive.

My experiences in India have been immeasurably enriched by my friendship with Willliam Bissell, who I know from our time together at Wesleyan University.  The son of an American father and an Indian mother, he grew up in Delhi and went back after college to live in rural Rajasthan and worked to encourage weavers and craftspeople to form cooperatives to better promote their products.  He and his father started the Fabindia School because he saw that girls were simply not being educated in these rural areas.  The school subsidizes girls’ education through outside fundraising efforts.  It now boasts 4 buildings and hundreds of students. 

That reminds me.  I must ask William if he can locate someone who isn’t too shy or awestruck to sit next to the Maharani and show her how to use the internet.  Or maybe a Putney student would be willing?

All photographs contributed by Evie Lovett