CDO Ajaya Shankar Pandeya is engaging block and village level development workers to collect information and build a database about Braja culture. Along with their usual tasks, they are now required to also inquire into local culture, in particular about "the way it was in the time of Krishna," especially to identify places that have some relation to the Puranic tales and legends.
The CDO said that the Braja culture and traditions have spread in every village of Braj. Each has its own stories and legends that are unknown elsewhere. This research will go into finding out more information about this heritage and cataloging forgotten or hidden historical places.
A data base will be built up that includes details about each village’s hills, water basins, ancient ruins and sacred places. The appropriate geographical information about all these places will also be collected.
On completion, the database will be verified against textual or archeological data, or by local scholars. This will be followed by the making of a tourist map and the creation of tourist circuits through the more developed villages. The last leg of the plan will be to build roads and so on to facilitate travel to and from these places.
This last paragraph finally elucidates the mystery behind the development officer's descent into a realm generally left to anthropologists and cultural historians. Since when do people charged with economic development engage in this kind of exercise? The answer is that we want to maximize Braj's value as a tourist destination in the short and long term.
But has there not been a discovery of Braj going on for the last 500 years or more? Is not practically every place in Braj already known for its specific Krishna-related value ? And surely there are numerous books, from Braja-bhakti-vilasa in Sanskrit to Entwistles's Braj: Centre of Krishna Pilgrimage, which catalog the places of Braj. And the Braj Foundation has been doing a marvelous job of mapping Braj, especially where the kunds and hills are concerned.
Of course, no one will doubt that more work of this sort could be done, though it remains to be seen whether block development officers and village panchayati leaders are the best people suited for this kind of work. Renaissance men can no doubt be found everywhere.
Nevertheless, it should be noted here that in the world of development, tourism and pilgrimage are two totally different things.
In the June 4 Mathura edition of Amar Ujala, the Mathura tourist office is quoted as saying that it was having trouble assessing how many tourists came into the area. One thing was certain, though: they don't count pilgrims as tourists. Pilgrims belong to a different economic class and are apparently not even worth counting. One goes to hotels, the other to Dharamshalas or ashrams.
The reporters who wanted to know the closest estimates for pilgrimage figures to Braj got no help from the tourist office, which does not keep such statistics. You see, people who go to see the Taj Mahal or visit the Mathura museum are tourists. People who come to take darshan of Banke Bihari or Dwarkadhish are not.
So the wise men and women who rule India's future have determined that Mathura-Vrindavan's destiny is to become a tourist trap. They will parlay Krishna into a tourist attraction. Well, I am not altogether against it, as long as they keep the two worlds separate. If they must have a Krishna theme park with a 500 foot tall statue of Krishna surrounded by Kaliya Nag shaped water slides, let them have it. Let the day-tripping Delhi bourgeoisie and a certain class of foreign tourist have their Hindu kitsch.
But let them do it it FAR away from the sacred historical and cultural sites that have real meaning for the devotee pilgrims of today.
What a foolishness it is to minimize the economic importance of Indian pilgrims! The search for the European or American tourist dollar is perhaps an inevitable aspect of globalization, but it will never be able to match the economic value provided by India's own faithful, to whom Vrindavan still has profound meaning!
What is needed now is fresh thinking on this matter. Do you wreck the old Vrindavan, the pilgrims's Vrindavan, to make it accessible to people who at best would only be motivated to visit it by nothing more than a fleeting curiosity?
Vrindavan is not a dead archaeological ruin like a ziggurat in Mesopotamia. It is a living sacred place. And to treat it as nothing more than a tourist attraction is frankly nothing less than sacrilege. Especially when that attitude entails a slow process of murdering it, by chopping down trees, by replacing ashrams with weekend condos, pilgrim walkways with four-lane highways, and covering the holy river and sacred ghats with flyovers!
The way to plan tourism for Braj is to develop it AS a sacred place of pilgrimage. To develop the sacred character of the land. The current plans being rammed through are so wrongheaded they stagger the imagination. The sadhus and sants of Braj are left dumbfounded watching the big heads and suits come here from their Delhi, Agra and Lucknow offices to stomp all over this land without the slightest feeling for what makes Vrindavan something of value in the first place.
Vrindavan is not some curiosity to be stared at, or oohed and aahed at. Let's work on getting Vrindavan to be what it was meant to be, not what some tourist development officer thinks will attract tourist dollars. There will be no fear for economic development.
Vrindavan as it was meant to be is the abode of the All-attractive Lord and Lady of Love. The people who are attracted to Them will attract people from all corners of the globe.
Turn Vrindavan into a heap of ruins and it will sink into oblivion. It may be surrounded on all sides by superhighways, but it will just be something to throw your empty Coke bottle at as you go gawking by on the overpass.
Even the Taj Mahal only holds a tourist's interest for a few moments. The real Vrindavan's attraction is far more powerful than that. Why are we trading diamonds for grains of sand?
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