A South Indian Journey

by Michael Wood

  *

  Around six I took an auto-rickshaw to book a ticket for my journey at Egmore Station, the terminus for trains to the deep south. It is a little ritual I always like to do the night before setting off south. Egmore is a crowded quarter of cheap hotels and allnight food stands, huddles of shanties along the line. Across the tracks is the unkempt graveyard of St Andrew’s Kirk, whose spire rises over the station. When it was built in 1820 this was the ‘Queen of Scottish churches in the east’, ‘the most magnificent edifice in Hindustan’. It is still a lovely building, made, like the temples, from Madras chunam, a hard white lime stucco which gives a polish of finest marble. Inside, supported by a ring of white Doric columns, is a sky-blue dome painted with the constellations which can be viewed over Scotland, ‘so the devout kneeling in prayer could imagine themselves under their native skies’.

  It was a typical early evening at Egmore, a good place to savour the beginning of a journey. My shirt was still damp with the lingering heat of the day. Thousands of people were sitting everywhere on the platforms, surrounded by their belongings, bedrolls and cooking gear, waiting for the night trains, the women in brightly coloured saris, kids asleep across their laps, men in cotton shirts and lungis. On the TV monitors above them old film musicals jangled away. Picking their way through the crowds food vendors were calling out ‘vadai, vadai’. Alongside the carriages, stalls were selling fruit, nuts, biscuits and water for the journey. An old woman, still athletic and willowy, walked lightly past me on bare feet, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and carrying a big basket overflowing with jasmine, which women buy to tie in their hair. It is said that no culture loves flowers as much as the Tamils. (You can see it in their poetry too: in the Tamil Odes, one poet manages a minor botanical tour de force, naming ninety-nine different kinds of flowers in a single poem.) After the woman had passed, the platform was left for a while with the lingering fragrance of jasmine.

  The station’s big gloomy interior is held up by rows of cast-iron columns rather like St Pancras in London, but on reflection more like the hall of a southern temple – an impression heightened by the smell of incense and flowers. Through an open doorway in the line inspector’s office is a huge old framed print of the god Venkateshwara, festooned with shrivelled braids of the morning’s marigolds. (Venkateshwara is the bringer of money: his is reputedly the single richest shrine in the world.) The inspector puts down the phone, rises and comes out, clipboard in hand; on his forehead are three vertical stripes of sandalwood paste and vermilion. Here in the south, even in a station, you never quite lose the sense of the presence of the divine.

  On the departures board are the the Quilon Mail and the Lalgudi Passenger. The Rock Fort Express is leaving for Trichy at nine. The Rameshwaram Express has just gone, and will arrive at the island tomorrow afternoon, but there’s still the slow train if you have the time – twenty-four hours and 118 stations! Travel here has a different rhythm and different pace. I picked up a timetable from the ticket office, a two-hundred-page book for 7 rupees. There are sections telling you how to order bedrolls and ‘non-veg food’ up the line. (Vegetarianism is strong in Tamil Nadu; places serving meat usually, specify. They are often still called ‘military’, a hangover from British days.) The timetable is a complete travel guide: it carries adverts for Ayurvedic doctors (‘handy for Tirur station’); bookshops (‘Public depend on Higgin-bothams Ltd’) and pilgrim hotels, pages of them (‘World-famous A/c restaurant… homely food and princely treatment… close to holy Mahamaham tank’). There’s even a form ‘for lodging complaint in case of robbery or dacoity in running trains’. And there, on page 128, is what the timetable in an uncharacteristic moment of restraint calls Paradise on Earth, ‘the seat of the grand conception of the Cosmic Dance, the noblest image of God and the peak of Hindu art’: Chidambaram.

  Clutching my precious ticket I walked back to Ellis Road along the canal, past the sleepers on the street submerging in the rumbustious street life as night came on. Along Mount Road the street sellers were out with the evening crowds, spreading their wares on cloths along the pavement: antiquated clockwork parts, medievallooking door locks, coloured apothecary’s bottles, pornographic pictures, cheap watches from Hong Kong, city maps, magazines, shoes made out of strips of tyre rubber. At little wooden cubicles with drop-down fronts the owners sit, preparing pan, selling biscuits and matches, or offering to repair anything mechanical (‘We undertake tinkering’). At the entrance to an alley, in a ring of oil-lamps, a mongoose straining on a leash prepared to fight a drugged cobra, while his owner took five-rupee bets. Further on, the crowds poured into a cinema to see the latest hit by the Tamil star Ragini Kanth. (Madras is now the hub of the biggest film industry in the world.)

  Outside Higginbotham’s Bookshop are some of the permanent denizens of this part of Mount Road: two beggers, a mother and her daughter. The mother has lost the fingers of one hand through leprosy and has plied this broken bit of pavement for years. And close by, outside the latest fast-food house, with its uniformed doorkeepers and rows of Ambassador cars, there is a Saiva holy man who has also been here for years in between his journeys north and south. He is almost bald now, with an ash-striped forehead, his beard white. He has a saffron wrap, a cloth bag, an old umbrella, an iron trident and a bowl. A figure from a different age, from another history, he sits murmuring an old song over and over again: ‘He is always hard to find… but you will find him in a good heart.’ Above him is a thirty-feet-high, hand-painted cut-out of Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator. ‘Non-stop excitement!’ says the caption. ‘He’s here. The screen’s greatest action hero.’

  That evening I took a taxi down Radakrishnan Road to Mylapore for a meal with friends. Prithvi is a journalist; Ashvin a businessman; they have a nice unpretentious house in a leafy suburb bristling with wrought-iron gates, security guards and imported Maruti cars. It is so pleasant, in fact, so leafy, ordered, and clean, so far removed from the shanties along the city’s stinking central canal, that if you narrow your eyes you could almost be in retirement land in Brighton. Until, that is, you notice the longhorned white cow on the corner or the old sadhu with his trident walking doggedly along some ancient Tamil, songline through what is for him invisible modernity.

  Their big main room is sparsely furnished with divans and steelframed chairs; there is modern abstract art on the walls, a tribal rug under a glass coffee table. On the sideboard a little Nataraja. A fan turns in the ceiling. Ashvin and Prithvi have two children, a boy aged fourteen and a girl of nine. They also have a cook cum housekeeper. Prithvi is beautiful; she wears winter worsteds at the moment, in autumnal browns and reds, and the finest Kanchi silk in the summer. She has long loose black hair and a pale face. She can be frosty – she is an intimidating intelligence – but she has devastating charm when she wishes. A dark languid beauty with an alluring hint of melancholy, she floats across the room tall and erect. When she looks at you with her big eyes over the table she resembles no one more than those airbrushed faces of goddesses you see on the pilgrim stalls. It is hard not to be in her thrall; especially, one imagines, for Ashvin, who is a gentle and goodnatured man, and comes over as reasonableness personified.

  When I arrived, the conversation was on the usual Madras hassles: the long drought and the vanishing water lorry, the unpredictable electricity supply.

  ‘Current is so variable; bulbs keep exploding. Oh, Ash, I do wish you would sort it out with the Electricity Board. They need to come and check it all out; I told you to do it last week.’

  The lights wavered again and we all waited with bated breath until the bulb did indeed explode, showering the polished tile floor with shards of glass. Roused to action, Prithvi humphed, seized the phone and laid into a trembling minion at customer complaints. Letting it all wash over him, Ash continued serving beers. Everyone, he said, was excited about the changes which had already come about within two years of Rajiv Gandhi’s death; in particular, Rao’s government’s loosening of the restrictio
ns of forty years of protectionism.

  ‘The free market is coming to India now – the only way forward – advance the life of the people. We are potentially the biggest market in Asia.’

  Their friend Bhima, who is an old-style lefty, was unconvinced. ‘Congress government had great achievements: a dramatic fall in infant mortality, nationwide provision of electricity, the huge rise in the middle class – nearly 40 per cent of the population. But what bothers me now is the fear that unfettered capitalism will ride roughshod over the five hundred million poor who live in dire poverty. They will not share in this improvement once we abandon the socialist ethic. I fear the gap between them and the rich will grow only wider.’

  Still hanging on for the local manager, Prithvi shook her head. ‘Key is economic advancement. The free market is the only way to lift people.’ She put down the phone. ‘I just wish he would go further and faster.’

  ‘Frankly,’ said Ashvin, ‘I think the biggest worry at the moment is the Muslim–Hindu question: there is a distinct smell of burning in the air.’

  This was the time when the Hindu fundamentalist party, the BJP, was threatening to ‘reclaim’ the sites of Hindu temples allegedly replaced by mosques in the Middle Ages; in north India the Ayodhya mosque, the legendary birthplace of Rama, was already a battleground.

  ‘I fear for the future: there is trouble brewing and the prime minister is not handling it. These communal issues are being exploited by unscrupulous politicians just for political gain. We brought up our kids not to be aware of it. The success of the BJP is to bring it to the fore. Thankfully this is not such an issue down here, where Hindu–Muslim relations have always been peaceful.

  ‘That said,’ he added, ‘it seems to me that the India we grew up with, the secular India of Nehru and Gandhi, is now over. And a different India is emerging. Less likeable, sure; more Indian maybe.’

  Tamil Nadu has had its own conflicts over myth and history. Not as explosive perhaps as in the north, but still tumultuous. The great issue here has been the Tamil nationalist or Dravidian movement which has dominated the state since Independence. It started back in the twenties as the Self Respect Movement: asserting that caste and Brahmins and Sanskrit were alien elements in the south, and that northerners had discriminated against the dark-skinned southerners. There was a pure ‘Tamil’ culture, it was claimed, which could still be recovered by rejecting these intrusions from the north.

  At one period Dravidian political independence was seriously mooted among the reformers. Most prominent of these was E.V. Ramaswami Naicker, or ‘Periyar’ (the great prophet), a rotund iconoclast, who died in 1973 aged nearly one hundred. In 1947, as Indian Independence loomed, Naicker wrote in the Hindu newspaper warning the south ‘not to replace the domination of the British by the Aryans in Delhi’, and calling for an independent Dravidistan. That never came about; nor in the eyes of most Tamils was it ever likely. But the reformers did not let up in their fierce agitation against traditional Brahminical culture in the south. Naicker even publicly burned the Ramayana on the Marina beach, saying that the story of Rama’s conquest of Sri Lanka was merely a parable of the Aryan domination of the south.

  Naicker was above all unremitting in his railings against the privileges enjoyed by Brahmins – not only temple priests like the Dikshithars, but Brahmins like Ashvin and Prithvi. In his most vitriolic speeches he even called for the killing of Brahmins. Historically, of course, the Brahmins had been top of the caste system. Though not necessarily the best off economically, they were supported by great tracts of land across the south in the form of temple endowments. Also, they were the specialists in literacy. Hence, not surprisingly, they had done well under the British, who needed their skills to administer the empire. But in the south the tide turned against them long before Independence. Later, when Congress was voted out in 1967, a wind of change blew through Tamil Nadu as the lower castes began to exert themselves: a revolt against a millennium or two of history. Suddenly Brahmins found the boot was on the other foot: discrimination against them, including wholesale seizure of temple lands and treasures. In a few decades the old world which been inherited from ancient times had been turned upside down.

  ‘We’ve now had forty years of anti-Brahmin politics by the DMK parties down here,’ said Ashvin. ‘Especially since DMK won in 1967. We’ve had university and employment quotas since then. The crazy thing is, we have brought the children up not to consider themselves Brahmins. Now the quota system which guarantees places for the lower castes has put terrible pressure on them – only the very top marks can get them a place in university. And, to cap it all, with the fundamentalists on the march, our kids come back from school saying, ‘I’m a Brahmin, after all. Why can’t I say I am proud to be a Brahmin?’

  They were amused by my return to Chidambaram; by my affection for its small-town atmosphere; by my attachment to its traditions. Though Brahmins, Prithvi and Ashvin simply do not identify with this world. They are secular, modern people, the product of Nehru’s India. Their friend Bhima took a gentle dig at me: ‘Western people are very naïve about Indian religion. Most of these sadhus are fakes; they represent a dying culture which has long ceased to be creative. It can only imitate its own past in a debased form. When the TV revolution hits the villages, communications will transform and democratize the country. This has been the biggest bar to progress; we are an ancient land, but we are still a juvenile nation.’

  He bearded me with a twinkle: ‘Mark my words, Michael, all this religious mumbo-jumbo, myths and epics – India will be the least religious country in the world ten years or so from now!’

  ‘Oh, come off it,’ said the other guest, Kamala, a classical dancer. ‘You’re just pulling his leg now.’

  ‘Not at all. I believe it; and the sooner the better.’

  ‘But surely not in the south?’ Kamala said.

  ‘Well, maybe not the south,’ he conceded.

  Kamala went on, ‘We Tamilians have always been more successful at preserving our culture. There is no reason why the best of traditional cultures cannot coexist in the modern world. India has always been good at taking what she wants of the outside and discarding the rest. Look at Prithvi, she’s the model of a modern Indian career woman. Flies off to Washington at the drop of a hat. But she is still a traditional Tamil in some aspects of her life. She still sees her astrologer for major decisions, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, it’s partly just a bit of fun,’ said Prithvi, pulling a face. ‘Though Ashvin did not change his job this October because the astrologer said not.’

  ‘More beer?’ said Ashvin, coming in with a tray from the kitchen.

  Kamala continued, ‘And take Ashvin here. Here he is, born a Brahmin but he brings his children up as good secular Indians, don’t you, Ash? Years ago he put his Brahmin’s thread in a drawer.’ The six-string thread is supposed to be worn from puberty to death by Brahmin men.) ‘Look at him, he drinks beer. You eat meat too, don’t you, Ash?’

  He spluttered.

  ‘He’s never been down south, have you, Ash?’

  ‘No. Look, you are either modern or traditional. We are secular Indians; we are Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. We have tasted the fruit. We cannot go back. Sad, but there it is.’

  Kamala disagreed. ‘Where’s the poetry in your soul, Ashvin? Discover your past. Go down and spend a few days by the Cavery.’

  Everyone laughed – Kamala was on her hobby-horse.

  ‘No, no, really,’ she went on. One day you should take a trip down there; take a trip to Tiruvidaimarudur.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Prithvi, ‘it’s funny, but Ashvin said something about all this recently. He found his Brahmin’s string in the drawer the other day. Tell them what you said, Ash.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Ashvin.’ I was thinking again about my Brahmin’s thread and the rituals of the twice born. It made me think of the festivals at Mylapore when I was a child: the celebration of the saints, the great processions wh
en all their statues are taken round the streets. These shadowy things have made us. I did think that I might one day go down south off the beaten track and see what you have seen.’

  ‘Yes, Ash, you must go and spend a few days by the Cavery river. Go to see the temples and listen to the songs of the oduvars. Go to Tiruvidaimarudur.’

  ‘OK, I will. I promise.’ He laughed. ‘One day.’

  4

  To the South

  The day was already hot when the train emerged from the dark canopy of Egmore into the blinding sunlight and rumbled slowly out through the suburbs. Over the Coum canal and the Adyar river, and past St Thomas Mount. The rains had not yet come, and the air was stifling despite the overhead fans in the carriage. In between gardens of coco palms, new buildings were sprouting everywhere. Further on, the lakes at Chingleput looked magnificent: a shimmering expanse covered with birds. A big kite wheeled and fell put of the sun to take a fish from the water. The crystalline blue water reflected the fringe of rocky red hills and the pointed spire of Tirukalikundran, where it would soon be lunchtime for the eagles.

  I had a conversation with an advocate from Gwalior, on the way to Pondi with his wife, who was also an advocate. He wore traditional clothes, a white kurta, tilak mark on his forehead, tiffin box by his side.

  ‘Don’t be idealistic about India; 95 per cent of people here don’t believe in God either! Open your papers any day: how many women are brutalized, even burned, by their husbands’ families. It is another view of India from the bench of the law, my dear fellow. But all is changing: there is TV and video, even in the villages now. This will inevitably advance the cause of democracy. Change is always, but it is more rapid now, and ideas are the motor of change. Now – or soon – all will have acess to them. Look, not so long ago as a Brahmin I would have been outcast for travelling abroad, as we have done; we would have lost our Brahminical purity. Few adhere to such outdated taboos now. Even mixing with you foreigners was not so long ago impossible.’