Stark realities of the remnants of a diaspora
Two broadcast journalists’ eyewitness account of the harsh realities in India
by Paul Chaderjian
Tangra, India - The scene is hell on Earth - a revolting, gagging smell, eye-irritating smog, thousands of years of filth with fresh refuse being dumped onto the street.
Humans live like savages. Naked kids defecate on the street. Men urinate out in the open. Rats run in puddles of human waste on streets people call home.
Rabid and sickly dogs dig through garbage for food.
This is the "incredible" India the ads on CNN sing about.
And in this incredible India are two old friends - Ani Hovannisian-Kevorkian and me - stumbling out of tour buses to enter the grounds of the Holy Trinity Armenian Church in Tangra, a suburb of Kolkata.
Security guards separate residents staring with great interest from the foreign tourists that include Ani and me.
Ani anchored the English News on Horizon TV every Saturday night decades ago when there was only one weekly one-hour Armenian television news program on the air in Southern California.
She reported about the Karabakh Movement, independence, the harsh post-earthquake realities, the victims of the Sumgait massacre, and the breakup of the Soviet Union. She would soon graduate from UCLA, and I had just earned my BA from USC.
The year was 1989, and we were new to the world. TV was new to the Armenian community in L.A.
Flash forward to 2008, and I am interviewing her. She is an accomplished broadcast journalist now, a former ABC News producer, host, documentary and television series reporter, producer, and director.
She is also a wife and a mother, and she is helping me process what we see.
"Here we are, hearing the Lord's Prayer in Tangra. It's surreal," she says to me. "Twenty-some-year-long friends from Los Angeles, from the days when we were just starting Armenian television to now when we have a 24-hour channel from Etchmiadzin and a crew traveling the world over so that our people see and live through what they see on television."
Ani speaks into my audio recorder as if she is reporting live on camera. There are no satellite trucks here. No cameras except for the one from Etchmiadzin's Shoghokat TV. There's no live, global CNN audience. Only two Armenians - a little older, a little wiser, perhaps - trying to understand our place in the world.
And what we see in Tangra are inhumane and un-human conditions.
This is where the poorest Indians we will see on this trip live. This is where they sell individual cloves of garlic, fruits, spices, and parts of fish. This is where they tailor saris, solder broken wheels, sell cell phones, cook food on makeshift bonfires, bathe, and socialize over coffee or tea.
This is poverty beyond comprehension, beyond belief. We are told other parts of India are worse than this.
Once Armenians lived in this neighborhood. Some may have come, like the natives who have remained, to work in, manage, or own the large leather tanneries in the area.
The tanneries are gone now, but the offspring of the workers remain, multiplying without birth control, living in makeshift homes on narrow streets. These are conditions, realities and smells that no documentary Ani or I would make could fairly depict on the plasma screens and HDTVs back home.
Alongside this nightmarish scene from a bad Hollywood movie, off a maze of small streets, where rickshaws and motorcycles swerve to miss buses, is a pristine white wall.
On the other side of the wall is the newly renovated Holy Trinity Armenian Church of Tangra - an oasis of green and clean amidst hell on earth.
"The poverty is beyond describable. It's people not living as people," says Ani. "We are here with some 100 Armenians from around the world participating in celebrations of Armenians in India (Armenian Reporter, November 15 and November 22, 2008).
Ani says what she is seeing is overwhelming. Numbing, she calls it.
"We think of ourselves as people who have a sense of humanity of compassion, of caring, of reaching out to people, but it is so overwhelming," she says. "I don't lose that compassion and wanting to reach out and touch and learn about everybody, but it's beyond reach. Little children running naked in the streets."
Ani is here with her father, scholar Richard G. Hovannisian - UCLA professor emeritus, author, editor, Armenian Educational Foundation Professor of Modern Armenian History. Dr. Hovannisian is about to present a lecture to those gathered about the history of Armenians in India.
"I thought I had an idea of what to expect from India, but my thoughts were far off," says Ani. "People urinating and defecating in the streets. The garbage is mountains and mountains and mountains of garbage. And people living life not as we know it, but life like they know it."
The humanist in her quickly comes to life, and Ani says she has stopped and looked at each child we have passed and acknowledged the light inside them.
"Like right now, when we were coming into the gate of the church in Tangra, there were children standing outside," she says. "I just stood and looked at every one of them as individuals and what they could be in life and who they are, and their future. I can't imagine that they're going to have much of a future, not in these conditions, but who they could have been."
Inside the gates of the Armenian Church is another sad reality - reminders of the Armenian community that once flourished in India.
Headstones, a brand new two-story community center, and a renovated church are all that's left of a place that was once full of people, a country that was home to the intellectuals of the Armenian community in the 1600s.
The literature and books of these pre-revolutionary Armenians - who mostly lived in Chennai - would go on to inspire the revolutionaries of the late 1800, the founders of political parties that exist today.
"This thriving community, to see it now, not all but gone, but really gone is a sad reminder of what it means to live in a diaspora," says Ani. "One feels proud. I feel proud when I see an Armenian church. I feel a sense of history. I look at the tombstones that are so beautifully etched in Armenian here in India, 200 years ago. I say, ‘Wow. Who they were. How they got here and what they built here,' and now it's gone."
Ani takes another deep breath, flashes a big smile, and brings the positive back into light and into our mind's eye. She smiles a broad, knowing smile, and emphasizes the reason Armenians have gathered in India.
"We're trying to recapture it. We're trying to remember the value of it and what it means. I'm glad we're doing it. And there is still an Armenian community, albeit small, and I hope that that community remains and in some way grows."
Ani says there's hope in the children of the Armenian College, who come from faraway countries to learn Armenian here.
"The older gentlemen, Chacha, Charles Sarkies, whom I met yesterday, had filled up with tears and with such feelings of despair and hope at the same time about what had been here," says Ms. Hovannisian. "He came here as a 12-year-old from Iran, and he is 83. He cries that nobody speaks Armenian any more."
The scholar's daughter says this is part of the Armenian experience. The poverty outside the gates, the oasis she has dubbed the Armenian Church in the Slums, the beautiful Indian children with their deep, dark brown eyes. What they could be if given a chance, she ponders.
"This is part of our history, the coming together of the difference parts of our present, from different parts of the world, from Armenia, from Iran, from Australia, and they're here, in Tangra, in the outskirts of Kolkata, with a 27-person choir from Etchmiadzin and the Vehapar," she says, referring to the Catholicos of All Armenians and as if she was reporting to a camera.
"It's surreal, but I'm glad to be here. It's been a beautifully hospitable reception by the community members, and they've been planning for it for a long time. And they've received everyone in a very memorable and very gracious way."
Tangra, India - The scene is hell on Earth - a revolting, gagging smell, eye-irritating smog, thousands of years of filth with fresh refuse being dumped onto the street.
Humans live like savages. Naked kids defecate on the street. Men urinate out in the open. Rats run in puddles of human waste on streets people call home.
Rabid and sickly dogs dig through garbage for food.
This is the "incredible" India the ads on CNN sing about.
And in this incredible India are two old friends - Ani Hovannisian-Kevorkian and me - stumbling out of tour buses to enter the grounds of the Holy Trinity Armenian Church in Tangra, a suburb of Kolkata.
Security guards separate residents staring with great interest from the foreign tourists that include Ani and me.
Ani anchored the English News on Horizon TV every Saturday night decades ago when there was only one weekly one-hour Armenian television news program on the air in Southern California.
She reported about the Karabakh Movement, independence, the harsh post-earthquake realities, the victims of the Sumgait massacre, and the breakup of the Soviet Union. She would soon graduate from UCLA, and I had just earned my BA from USC.
The year was 1989, and we were new to the world. TV was new to the Armenian community in L.A.
Flash forward to 2008, and I am interviewing her. She is an accomplished broadcast journalist now, a former ABC News producer, host, documentary and television series reporter, producer, and director.
She is also a wife and a mother, and she is helping me process what we see.
"Here we are, hearing the Lord's Prayer in Tangra. It's surreal," she says to me. "Twenty-some-year-long friends from Los Angeles, from the days when we were just starting Armenian television to now when we have a 24-hour channel from Etchmiadzin and a crew traveling the world over so that our people see and live through what they see on television."
Ani speaks into my audio recorder as if she is reporting live on camera. There are no satellite trucks here. No cameras except for the one from Etchmiadzin's Shoghokat TV. There's no live, global CNN audience. Only two Armenians - a little older, a little wiser, perhaps - trying to understand our place in the world.
And what we see in Tangra are inhumane and un-human conditions.
This is where the poorest Indians we will see on this trip live. This is where they sell individual cloves of garlic, fruits, spices, and parts of fish. This is where they tailor saris, solder broken wheels, sell cell phones, cook food on makeshift bonfires, bathe, and socialize over coffee or tea.
This is poverty beyond comprehension, beyond belief. We are told other parts of India are worse than this.
Once Armenians lived in this neighborhood. Some may have come, like the natives who have remained, to work in, manage, or own the large leather tanneries in the area.
The tanneries are gone now, but the offspring of the workers remain, multiplying without birth control, living in makeshift homes on narrow streets. These are conditions, realities and smells that no documentary Ani or I would make could fairly depict on the plasma screens and HDTVs back home.
Alongside this nightmarish scene from a bad Hollywood movie, off a maze of small streets, where rickshaws and motorcycles swerve to miss buses, is a pristine white wall.
On the other side of the wall is the newly renovated Holy Trinity Armenian Church of Tangra - an oasis of green and clean amidst hell on earth.
"The poverty is beyond describable. It's people not living as people," says Ani. "We are here with some 100 Armenians from around the world participating in celebrations of Armenians in India (Armenian Reporter, November 15 and November 22, 2008).
Ani says what she is seeing is overwhelming. Numbing, she calls it.
"We think of ourselves as people who have a sense of humanity of compassion, of caring, of reaching out to people, but it is so overwhelming," she says. "I don't lose that compassion and wanting to reach out and touch and learn about everybody, but it's beyond reach. Little children running naked in the streets."
Ani is here with her father, scholar Richard G. Hovannisian - UCLA professor emeritus, author, editor, Armenian Educational Foundation Professor of Modern Armenian History. Dr. Hovannisian is about to present a lecture to those gathered about the history of Armenians in India.
"I thought I had an idea of what to expect from India, but my thoughts were far off," says Ani. "People urinating and defecating in the streets. The garbage is mountains and mountains and mountains of garbage. And people living life not as we know it, but life like they know it."
The humanist in her quickly comes to life, and Ani says she has stopped and looked at each child we have passed and acknowledged the light inside them.
"Like right now, when we were coming into the gate of the church in Tangra, there were children standing outside," she says. "I just stood and looked at every one of them as individuals and what they could be in life and who they are, and their future. I can't imagine that they're going to have much of a future, not in these conditions, but who they could have been."
Inside the gates of the Armenian Church is another sad reality - reminders of the Armenian community that once flourished in India.
Headstones, a brand new two-story community center, and a renovated church are all that's left of a place that was once full of people, a country that was home to the intellectuals of the Armenian community in the 1600s.
The literature and books of these pre-revolutionary Armenians - who mostly lived in Chennai - would go on to inspire the revolutionaries of the late 1800, the founders of political parties that exist today.
"This thriving community, to see it now, not all but gone, but really gone is a sad reminder of what it means to live in a diaspora," says Ani. "One feels proud. I feel proud when I see an Armenian church. I feel a sense of history. I look at the tombstones that are so beautifully etched in Armenian here in India, 200 years ago. I say, ‘Wow. Who they were. How they got here and what they built here,' and now it's gone."
Ani takes another deep breath, flashes a big smile, and brings the positive back into light and into our mind's eye. She smiles a broad, knowing smile, and emphasizes the reason Armenians have gathered in India.
"We're trying to recapture it. We're trying to remember the value of it and what it means. I'm glad we're doing it. And there is still an Armenian community, albeit small, and I hope that that community remains and in some way grows."
Ani says there's hope in the children of the Armenian College, who come from faraway countries to learn Armenian here.
"The older gentlemen, Chacha, Charles Sarkies, whom I met yesterday, had filled up with tears and with such feelings of despair and hope at the same time about what had been here," says Ms. Hovannisian. "He came here as a 12-year-old from Iran, and he is 83. He cries that nobody speaks Armenian any more."
The scholar's daughter says this is part of the Armenian experience. The poverty outside the gates, the oasis she has dubbed the Armenian Church in the Slums, the beautiful Indian children with their deep, dark brown eyes. What they could be if given a chance, she ponders.
"This is part of our history, the coming together of the difference parts of our present, from different parts of the world, from Armenia, from Iran, from Australia, and they're here, in Tangra, in the outskirts of Kolkata, with a 27-person choir from Etchmiadzin and the Vehapar," she says, referring to the Catholicos of All Armenians and as if she was reporting to a camera.
"It's surreal, but I'm glad to be here. It's been a beautifully hospitable reception by the community members, and they've been planning for it for a long time. And they've received everyone in a very memorable and very gracious way."
