India is famous for being many things at once; for the ability to swallow intrusive outside influences, to absorb them and recast them as Indian. Conquering societies, religions, languages, and industries, from the Mughals to Hollywood, generally meet the same fate. Even the colonial British, extractive and inflexible as any group can be, did not escape, with their cricket team consistently beaten and their zucchinis sold on the street as Jugni.
Pushkar is a fascinating place to test this interpretation of India. It’s a deeply spiritual and a major pilgrimage center: climbing one of its emerald hills, we were able to count at least 24 major places of worship in view at once. Its central lake, ringed by ghats and temples, is a place where only those who are completely oblivious could fail to recognize the presence of spiritual power. It’s also the traditional gathering place of semi-nomadic camel herders from around Rajasthan, who congregate once a year to sell their gangly beasts in a ridiculously photogenic Camel Fair. Walking the streets, it’s not hard to find women and men wearing traditional Rajasthani clothes and headwear, genuinely religious Sadhus, and vendors offering grass to feed to the ubiquitous cows.
These traditional and spiritual elements of Pushkar coexist with tourism. Tourism, and all that it implies: the countless hotels and hostels and cafes, the falafel shops, the restaurants serving “special” lassi, the kids selling pigeon-feed, the guys who won’t let you walk around the lake without shoving flowers in your face and demanding entirely voluntary donations in the amount of 500-1,000 rupees, and all the rest. The opportunity that tourism represents flows into the community unequally, as it does everywhere else. English-speaking Delhi guys manage the hostels, and local guys operate them. The less fortunate run the street scams that annoy us tourists.
We rolled in during “Unlock 4.0” in August, our first trip from Delhi during Corona times, and found that we were the first guests who had stayed at the hostel in months. Most of the usually overwhelming tourist activity was absent, save for a few usual groups of Delhi-ites shouting “bhai-yaa!” at waiters, and some dreadlocked, shoeless goras around the lake. We were able to see the city in a resting state and reflect on the influences that shape it.
This reflection leads to no answers other than a bewildered respect at how Pushkar is able to be all of these things, at once, and somehow still make sense. This is a town where deeply devout, conservative Hindus on a meaningful pilgrimage walk down the street side-by-side with stoned Israelis smoking their way through a post-military break- with both getting exactly what they want out of the experience. Maybe Pushkar proves that an ever denser, more connected, more diverse world can work.
We climbed to a hilltop temple on an evening with a golden sunset. Surveying the scene, it was hard to believe how small and perfect the city looked. All the ground-level complexity we’d been soaking in washed away. Emerald hills, lake, temples, homes, all in balance. Even during the times of Coronavirus, it seems, all is well from a Pushkar hilltop.
