This book is a journal kept by Jean-Claude van Itallie during his three months in India, Nepal and Ceylon in early 1971, includings visits to H.H. the Dalai Lama’s capital-in-exile, Daharmsala, seeing the Mother at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry, and a talk with the filmmaker Satyajit Ray in Calcutta. India Journal was edited by Michael Feingold and reached page proof, but the publisher (Winter House) went out of business before India Journal could be published.

1971... Jan 30... 5:30 P.M., Patankot Railway Station

   We were misinformed about the train time. We shall have to wait here six and a half hours.

   Patankot is a railway junction and a military base. Those are its claims to the map. It is as ugly and miserable a place as I have ever seen. The air is nearly unbreathable from factory fumes and the fumes of charcoal and the yak dung fires. It is very cold. Evening. From the bus stop to the station we came in a bicycle rickshaw -- a short haul through the muddy main street, murky with smoke and smog, crowded with people buying and selling and shivering. The cold is unusual this year, and no one is prepared.

   The ride here by bus from Dharamsala was worse than the ride out: the noise of this bus’s motor was a loud screech. The horn ceaseless ordered to the side pedestrians and bullock carts and bicycles. A face glimpsed out the window: a single young ,man, not particularly downtrodden, standing by the edge of the road in a small town, a wool scarf half-heartedly covering part of his head; he isn’t moving, he is just staring straight ahead. Toward what? By Western lights there is nowhere for him to go. Delhi? No means to go. Nothing to do if he gets there except sleep on the sidewalk with the others. No wonder the Easterner turns inward. No outward direction seems possible; to live inwardly is clearly the only way out.

   Yet certain yogic teachers have gone to the West because they say, "India is the land where the teachings have been lost." Perhaps that’s because when a person starts on a spiritual journey in America and Europe, it is an act of will, a conscious rejection of the seductive everyday world, the material world that wants us to want it. In India, on the other hand, most people don’t have the remotest possibility of acquiring any material things at all. To turn inward takes perhaps less of a conscious effort. Or perhaps that’s not it at all.

Everyone in the waiting room is coughing, including us, from the polluted air. So many are permanently sick.

    The electric lights blink on and off. Even in Delhi they are off for a few minutes at least once a day.

   I keep seeing the image of the dark worried driver of our bus, a dirty shawl around his head (just like the driver on the way up), sitting with one hand on the warming drive shaft — there must be an extreme point that he knows, beyond which even this tough old bus will stop or explode.

   Craig and I debated whether or not to go to Rishikesh, headquarters of the Maharishi and other divines. But it doesn’t seem like the season for complicated train and bus connections, so we are going back to Delhi if we can get a place on the train. The Collector said to come back to his office at seven.

From the lavatory a few feet on my left comes the sound of throat clearing and vomiting. Outside the waiting room are the voices of a hundred men and women chanting, selling, quarreling on the station platforms. This loud hum is accompanied by another hum, that of the faulty fluorescent lights overhead.

   Om Mani Padme Hum is maybe the best-known Sanskrit mantra. The four words are repeated over and over again, for their ultimately enlightening effect; the vibration of the sound in the head, even apart from its meaning, is important. What is the relation between the Hum of the mantra and hum of the fluorescent lights in this station? Word games. Although both hums may conceal the same bliss, that bliss seems too unbelievable far away from here. This place is dark, as if buried from sunshine forever, a hell, different from our new plastic ones back home, a more classic one, more naked.

    Of course railway stations over the world are bad, especially at nightfall, with sick and uncertain travelers, cold, covered in and breathing in soot, prey to their own fears reflected in the glare of the humanity around them. And there is this relatively quiet bench where I can write down my impressions in a notebook. This is the First Class Waiting Room, and even though I feel a little sick I know nonetheless that there will be a different moment for me later, a future when I will move out of here; the scenery and I will change. Everyone here is doubtless living on that same hope -— the train will come, eventually.

   But for the majority of Indians life here on earth is just like this railway station, and if a train should chance to come it will go only to another and similar railway station. Nobody wants to be reborn.

    Seven o’clock and we go back to the Railway Collector. He says he "very much doubts" there is a First Class night reservation available, but if I will come with him (despite the nine Indians with various travel documents their hands clamoring for his attention) he will "gladly show" us the Third Class cars to see if we might be satisfied with that if he could manage to give us confirmed reservations. "Of course," he says, showing us a compartment for fifty people with no whole windows, "This is the train for Calcutta, but the Delhi train is identical." What does he suggest, I ask. He stands there wringing his hands in an internationally infamous way, saying how much he wishes he could be of service, that with his help we can rest assured.... The situation is clear. A small tip will get us into Third Class. A larger tip will guarantee First Class. I give him the larger. Now, he says, "It must be done. It shall," and he practically salutes. I feel rotten. As I ought to. Everything is the same in this country as in any other, only more so; the wound is open.

Unpublished

Essays, articles, plays by Jean-Claude van Itallie have appeared in: