Pilgrimage to India: A Woman Revisits Her Homeland (Adventura Series)

It was a life changing book for me! It encompassed four corners of India in those few pages. Its not a book for people who only want accolades and praises for India and want to hear all good things about India. Its a book which tells the story behind the scene, it tells the tale of those faceless people who are struggling , suffering , either optimistically or with complains. Being born and brought up in India myself, I could never see that India had so many faces, so many angels , so many dimesnions .And I have realized that India is not just a land where saints ,spiritualy ,buddhism and Gods , Computers, IT , Sofware developers, engineers prosper, its a land where slums ,child-labor, anger, frustration and pains prosper too.
But I very gald to read that Pramila Jayapal didnot show India in hue of just Black and White, Right and Wrong and with the rigid ideas and preconceived notions that people carry with themseleves along with their luggage when they first land to this place.
She reveals her struggle to understand if what is Right in the books ,is really right in real life.
Its a beautiful book which balance Right and Wrong, balance Morals with self-conscious.

The author is a self-proclaimed "feminist"; this identity is too overbearing for her to interpret her observations of a strange country (sorry, but not really her "home" - she doesn't even speak any Indian language, including her mother-toungue Malayalam, the language of Kerala) with the respect and sympathy it deserves, especially since the author is not an expert on the topics her statements cover (e.g. spirituality).

Often she is utterly naive in trying to somehow make a point, such as this one in her chapter on Kerala: "how nice it was to find a temple devoted just to women godesses, where even men prostrated themselves in front of the goddesses." Even as a "feminist" point (?), this is unbelievably silly for a country with thousands of daily-worshipped goddess-shrines.

Her interactions with the social activists and groups, as they appear in the text, are very much tourist-like. Still she is at least much less biased and flawed than the likes of "May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India" by Elizabeth Bumiller. If you really want to read about the true position of women in Indian Society, read Madhu Kishwar. Not this.

Make no mistake: behind her Indian roots (name, appearance, etc.) the author is yet another Westerner, and the underlying tone is undeniably "us (Western) and them (Indian)".

However, her being of Indian origin, there is little room to doubt her empathy/outrage for the grim socioeconomic inequalities that persist in modern India. Her discussions on the bureaucratic failures in implementing the state policies, such as in education, are bold, forthright, and true to a great extent.

On the flip side, beware of her Indian connection. This book is NOT an "insider's view", but someone with mostly Western sensibilities coming to terms with what modern India has to offer - good or bad. She seeks not to "write simply about the sensational and the negative" (p73) about India, but has often done precisely that, albeit in a *sympathetic* tone. She stays in several states, yet surprisingly little observation of the regional heritage (handicraft, folklore, cuisine...) - deriving out of the amazing cultural diversity of the local populace - is made.

Yet, from child-labour to ojhas (shamans), it's backwardness aplenty; replete with graphic details of gutter-pigs (p64), down to listing the varieties of Lucknow's beggars (p66) and Varanasi-bathers' undergarments (p162), to some of the "64 ways for ghosts and pisachas (goblins) to be created" (p156)!!

Note for the serious reader: her takes on spirituality are amateurish, although honest, where Adi Sankaracharya is reduced to a mere "saint", Kabir to just a "poet", and Santana Dharma to "right living". Her few-day digs at Vipassana or Ramana-ashramam is more tourism than spirituality.

Also, her homework on Indian (Sanskrit) terms is sometimes lacking; guru-shishya (disciple) is not "guru-shiksha" (learning), sangam (confluence) is not "sangham" (association), Keshab Sen (famous Brahmo) is not "Reshab Sen", and calling Vidysagar as "Iswar Chandra" is like calling Gandhi as "Mohan Das"!

Seemingly, she lacks credibility on several of her accounts. She claims (p155) to have been told by "many" that incidents, such as where a Varanasi pundit would ask the devotees to *offer* their daughter to him and can buy her back later with several thousand rupees, "do still happen". If that's not enough, sample her take (p49) on Indian education: in "elite colleges" in India, "men can score 60 percent on an entrance examination and be eligible for admission, while women must score 80 percent". Rubbish!

The diligence with which she pursues the cause for women touches the reader's heart, despite her occasional over-enthusiasm (while on a trip from Bombay (p120) she manages to observe that the men in her bus were "clapping, singing" in "obvious enjoyment" upon watching a rape-scene in the movie on her bus-video!!).

The author is at her best while writing on Kerala, Swadhyaya, and her own premature delivery in Bombay. Particularly in the latter case, she is strikingly natural as she narrates from a genuinely personal point of view, without being judgmental or didactic, the way she finds the (Indian) world, as it is, around herself. I wish I could say that about the other chapters.

I recommend the following titles: "India Unbound" (socioeconomic history), "Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India" (Indian women), "Travelers' Tales India", "Culture Shock! India" (for tourists), "The Wishing Tree" (Indic tradition), "Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion" (spirituality-tourist).

Pilgrimage is a fair and honest assessment of some of the social issues faced by the people in India, especially women. Ms. Jayapal experience is conveyed to the reader in simple but not simplistic manner. I felt like her companion through her journey. She openly acknowledges her own strengths and weaknesses and those of Indian society. She does not judge issues as right or wrong, she knows the readers are intelligent enough to decide for themselves. The strength of a person and a society is the ability to look inward and realize that there is good and bad everywhere. Pramila Jayapal is a person of such remarkable strength. As someone who has lived half of my life in India and half abroad, I was able to identify with Pramila. Reading this book was both an emotional and a spiritual experience that I enjoyed.

Pramila Jayapal vividly presents all the beauty and splendor of India, contrasting with the poverty, sexism, corruption, and classism that is also India. This book especially touched my heart for two reasons: (1) my son was born prematurely, too, at only 24 weeks, and when I read the chapter about Pramila's son's birth I had tears rolling down my cheeks, and (2) I have a special fondness for India, because my husband and I became engaged while we were traveling there. This was one of the best travel memoirs of India I have read.