India, pigs, horns, 1950s, 1840s



During our group's orientation meeting in Delhi, our tour leader was talking about the traffic. 'You might wonder why Indian drivers blow their horns so much,' he said. 'It's so they'll know they're there. They have to make a noise so they can't tell they're alive.' Of course, we weren't meant to take that remark seriously. It was a mild joke at his compatriots', and his own, expense. The assumption underlying the joke, plainly enough, is that Indian traffic behaviour is weird, or at least that tourists will think so. And the ceaseless tooting of horns does take some getting used to. But given that every truck and rickshaw has a hand-painted sign on its rear end, a variation on 'Horn Please', you don't have to be a brilliant intercultural detective to figure out that the racket isn't meant rudely. Anyone on the road, driver or pedestrian, bicycle-rickshaw pusher or camel-rider, counts on the auditory signal to know when someone is coming up behind. When I was walking in a crowded street in Jaipur, disoriented and coping with extraordinarily complex traffic movements, I was very glad to know that if anyone came up behind me they would beep to let me know.

Then I remembered my childhood. Of course the traffic in a country town in North Queensland was a much more sedate affair than anything I experienced in an Indian city, but the polite thing in that time and place was also to blow the horn to indicate your intention to pass someone. To simply accelerate and overtake, as we do these days, would have been unthinkably rude. Suddenly India didn't seem so foreign.

And just today I read something that cast a similar light on what I had thought was another example of India's difference. Pigs roamed the streets and outskirts of a number of the villages we visited. We were told they performed the essential function of cleaning up the garbage -- and I can bear witness that this function includes snuffling up turds deposited discreetly or otherwise, by humans and others. This too, it turns out, is an arrangement that was once taken for granted in my own lovely city of Sydney. Peter Cochrane's Colonial Ambition is my source for this: unchaperoned pigs were often a problem in Sydney in the 1840s, but unlike the feral dogs that roamed the streets, they performed the same social purpose as their relatives do in Indian villages today, and I guess they continued to do so until the massive public work of the sewerage was undertaken decades later.

Another country can sometimes look very like the past.

Posted: Tue - February 19, 2008 at 07:16 PM           |

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