India Jones

“Africa is not a country.”

It is a phrase that’s often tossed accusingly towards those of us who, and let’s be honest most of us are guilty of this, tend to refer to the continent as a singular culture and identity: “I want to go to Africa and eat African food, and meet Africans, and do a safari” and such, as if you can consider planning a trip there much in the same manner one would consider planning a trip to Orlando. But of course it’s not a country, it’s a diverse continent of cultures, people, languages, and religions. To even offer the idea that Zambia and Mali are similar in any way more than that they both happen to exist on the same gigantic land mass vastly understates the differences that make each country and people what they are. Sadly however, we often struggle to make those distinctions, and I include myself in this category, when offering opinions from across the Atlantic.

India is a country.

It’s not a huge country by land mass, but perhaps you’ve heard, there are quite a few people who call it home: 1.3 billion of them in fact. And much in the same vein as Africa, we tend to lump everyone in India into the same bucket as “Indian”, and while at least in this case it’s technically correct, that doesn’t begin to address the complex and diverse groups of cultures and people that make up life on the subcontinent. 

Seven years ago, two of my close friends, Austin and Phil, took a year off after undergrad to travel around the world as part of an 8 month journey that touched on 5 continents and so many countries I can’t even begin to count them. It was a trip I desperately wanted to join them on, but without a penny to my name and in desperate need of a job, such a trip was not in the cards for me. Instead I lived vicariously through their adventures, following their progress and even meeting up for a short 2 week stint in South America, the best I could manage, to at least achieve a taste of life truly on the road.

Later after their return, I asked Austin what had been his favorite place throughout the entire trip, and he did not hesitate to respond. “India” he replied, “It’s not like any other place in the world.” And with that I knew that I wanted to go to there.

Six years later I find myself preparing to finally accomplish that goal, and in doing so am only now beginning to understand what it really means to visit a small part of India, and how that compares to visiting the country as a whole. In choosing a class for the University of Iowa’s India Winterim program, I had not been able to employ any referential knowledge of India, its states, cultures and people towards making a decision of where to study. The Ecotourism and Sustainable Development class sounded interesting, and it was in the state of Kerala, which a cursory google search told me was in the far south of the country. But aside from knowing that it was more southerly located than places more to the north, my knowledge of Kerala was completely nonexistent.

It was only later, as I began to tell friends who had traveled to India, or some of my Indian classmates here at the university, where I was traveling, that I began to realize that perhaps it had been a stroke of luck that Kerala had been a blind choice. 

I don’t know entirely what to expect as I write this two days before departure. My Indian education has only just begun, and at this point I still feel that I’m at the point where the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know. Kerala does not represent your typical Indian state, I know this, but at the same time it’s becoming more evident that perhaps there is no such thing as a typical Indian state anyways. 

One of the most impressive things about India to me is the sense of cultural identity shared by most Indians. I can hear it in the voices of my fellow students from India, who are simply excited that I have the opportunity to visit their country, regardless of the location. Try telling a Spaniard from Barcelona that you’re going to Madrid, or vice versa, and see how excited he or she gets. Spain is not India in so many ways, but when you consider each a land of peoples of related but different cultural backgrounds that share a closely tied history but not a common language, there are comparisons that can be made. 

And still India is not Spain. What truly amazes me is the concept of Indian pride in a country that represents so many different people, languages and cultures, and hasn’t even been in existence for 75 years. How all these different factors weave into the fabric that is modern India is something not easily replicated elsewhere in the world, and having a chance to experience this firsthand makes me all the more excited for a 3 week journey in to warm, sunny weather in the heart of January.