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Pilgrimage- One Woman’s Return To a Changing India: by Pramila Jayapal Kalyani Deshpande I am originally from Nagpur, India and have spent most of my life in Zambia. I currently live in California where I work as a web design & market research professional. I enjoy reading, travelling & sightseeing, animals and wildlife, cooking, decorating, music and movies. I also write poetry and short stories, mainly to soothe my soul and to chronicle the interesting twists and turns in my own life, but also to explore the human experience in this crazy adventure we call "life".

We have seen India through many eyes V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy and more recently, Jhumpa Lahiri. Each, through his or her unique way has offered us a perspective on the Indian experience. Pilgrimage is yet another offering, one intensely personal in nature. Documented in simple, elegant prose, this journey is Pramila Jayapal’s quest to find answers to many important questions, to seek a better understanding of self and identity.

Born in 1965 in Madras, India, Jayapal grew up in Indonesia and Singapore. Growing up outside India, she sampled Indian culture through a variety of channels, but never clearly understood in her own mind, what it meant to be Indian. At 16, she came to the United States to study and graduated with a B.A. in Literature from Georgetown University and later an MBA from Northwestern University. She began her career in the private sector and after some years of working in the corporate arena, decided to turn her energies toward the non-profit world. From this emerged an opportunity of a lifetime for the author a two-year fellowship funded by the Institute of Current Affairs to travel through India and write about contemporary societal issues. Pilgrimage is an account of her travels.

The author begins her journey in her home state of Kerela, located in southern India. It is there she is exposed to the first of many experiences that leave a lasting impression on her mind. She wrestles with the paradoxes of good and evil that exist in Indian society. On the one hand, she sees the good the strong sense of community, the belief in being part of a larger social order and on the other, the evil, from its simple form of piled garbage strewn on streets to the more complex manifestations of poverty, gender and caste discrimination. To deal with these opposites, she takes solace in the fact that Kerela is pegged as a development model, not only for other Indian states, but also for the world, boasting a high literacy rate, organized health care, low infant mortality and death rates. However, her high opinions crumble with a simple incident at a local temple where she is deemed unpure because she is a woman and she soon discovers that beneath all the development lies the fundamental societal structure common to all of India. As her stay continues, she is propelled to question her own reactions to these paradoxes, from simple choices of whether to give money to a beggar to the more difficult decisions of employing child labor. She soon realizes that India is made up of no absolutes only relatives that individual perception has to be sliced into different dimensions to achieve reasoning.

Throughout her travels, Jayapal informs us of various social movements such as Chipko and Swaydyaya. In her journey to Ladakh in northern India, she asks an important question whose choice is development? Her research confirms that as in every culture, Ladhaki culture has also been tinted by the West, with or without consent. She tells of a development effort where solar ovens were installed which proved useless because Ladhaki people thrived on a rice diet versus the intended bread and cake alternatives offered by the ovens. Jayapal concludes by pointing out that the most important factor in any development effort is listening to those who live with the consequences of development.

While dealing with paradoxes and social developmental issues, the author struggles to accept her own combination of Indian heritage and Western way of thinking. In Varanasi, she debates bathing in the waters of the holy river Ganga, where the residents of the city wash their clothing and allow their livestock to defecate in. Her Western ideas of hygiene steer her away but ironically, a year later, she visits the holy river and sets diyaas (oil lamps) afloat to give thanks for the birth of her son.

The author’s faith in India is finally tested through the difficult birth of her son towards the end of the book. Fighting against time, technology and society, she emerges with a new understanding that life involves surrender to one’s limits as a human being; not in a passive, negative way, but in a positive, life-celebrating acknowledgment of the greater universe.

Ultimately, through her collage of experiences, Jayapal finds answers to her questions and in doing so, leaves us with many questions of our own. What is striking about this book is the author’s openness in pondering over ideas and sharing her revelations, the honesty in dealing with the on-going internal debate, the humility of finding meaning in seemingly difficult situations and the desire to better understand her country. Nothing in India is simple or categorizeable, she remarks. loving India means being able to discuss both her good and bad.

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