A South Indian Journey

by Michael Wood

  His wife shifted the tiffin box to her side and began to spread out lunch. ‘Now, would you like to share our jaggery rice?’

  In fact I had already placed my lunch order. They have a great system on the southern railways: after Chingleput a boy comes round with little coffee flasks and takes your order, which they telegraph down the line from Tindivanam. When the train arrives at Villapuram Junction, usually around 1.30, the chap with the catering concession races across the platform with his kitchen assistants, holding towers of teetering metal lunch plates like circus jugglers. Vegetarian or ‘non-veg’ dishes – sambhar, dhal, curried vegetables, juniper berries, curd, pickle, a twist of salt – these you consume at your seat in the fifteen-minute stop at Villapuram. It is a simple and usually foolproof system, but today there had been a snag: after all the meals had been served, there was no food for me or a man across the aisle. The chap in the seat behind immediately insisted I take his: ‘You are our guest in our country. Besides my wife has brought us a picnic already.’

  He lifted the cloth from their basket to reveal a pre-prepared feast, including chicken legs. ‘We are non-veg, you see. We ordered extra vegetables just in case.’

  When we set off again, the kitchen manager was still arguing with the one irate passenger who had missed out. As the train pulled into Cuddalore the concessionaire was still scratching his head as his figures failed to add up one more time. Around him a mountain of used plates stood by the door ready for the journey back to his kitchen at Villapuram.

  Through the drowsy heat of the afternoon we travelled slowly down the coastal plain, rumbling over long bridges across the dried-up courses of rivers where only the odd green pond was left in immense tracts of wind-blown sand and camel thorn. In places the sandbanks were covered with brightly coloured clothes, sari cloths and bedspreads where the dhobis had found enough water to do their washing. I kicked off my shoes and spread the map out on the seat.

  This plain is the heartland of Tamil civilization. It is framed by the sea, the long chain of mountains and the high plateau of central India: the Deccan, an ancient fissured red land, arid and austere, burned by the sun for ten months of the year. Here in the southeastern corner of the subcontinent is a fertile flatland cut by the rivers Pennar, Vellar, Vaigai and above all the sacred Cavery: these rivers made the civilization.

  The southland – Ten Nadu as the Tamils call it – is different from the north in culture and language. The dark-skinned southerner going to Delhi feels himself to be in a foreign culture, and may even find himself subject to racial jokes and stereotypes.

  ‘It’s a foreign land to us up there,’ said the dapper young Tamil man whose family were sitting across the aisle. ‘I am working in Indore, inland from Bombay. It is really another world for a Tamil; without English I would be lost there.’ His two little daughters spoke and wrote Hindi, and were already losing their Tamil.

  ‘The English language has helped give unity to India. I could not work up north without it as I don’t speak Hindi.’ He’s working for a Japanese multinational tractor company. They are going back for a holiday to his home town, Kumbakonum, a lovely place on the Cavery river.

  ‘My dad was a schoolteacher there; he’s a traditional Tamil, you know, he still wears his dhoti and goes to the temple every day. I did an engineering degree; I escaped from that small world.’

  Exactly when the Tamils came into the south is a difficult question. They like to describe themselves as the original Indians. But the tribal peoples and aboriginals who still inhabit the forests of the Deccan and the Nilgiris obviously preceded them. The Tamils themselves are first mentioned in the inscriptions of the northern emperor Ashoka in the third century BC. But in the south they go back much further. Their language group, which we call Dravidian, is the fifth largest in the world: it includes Telugu Kannada and Malayalam, the other main languages of southern India, each of which has a long history and a great literature. But where Dravidian speakers originated is still a mystery. Clues to their origins are lost, perhaps for ever, in prehistory (though it is possible they may yet be recovered in the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley civilization). Their language has affinities with Elamite, the archaic and long-dead language of Persia. Mysteriously, it may also be linked through the Altaic speech of central Asia with Japanese, of all languages – but that connection is so controversial and in any case so far back in prehistory that for the moment it must be set aside. The northwest Indian–Iranian root is the one which at present looks most promising; indeed an outpost of Dravidian, Brahui, is still spoken by transhumant people in the uplands of Baluchistan on the Iranian border with Pakistan. Dravidian speakers almost certainly came into south India from this area some time during the last few millennia BC.

  Meanwhile the ‘Aryans’, Sanskrit speakers, migrated through the Hindu Kush into north-west India in the middle part of the second millennium BC, settling first in the north-west frontier, the Indus valley and the Punjab, and then, in the first millennium, in the Ganges–Jumna plain. Their language is Indo-European, distantly related to Latin and Greek and the western. European languages. It is the language of classical Indian civilization, of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Mahabarata and the Ramayana. The modern northern Indian dialects, Punjabi, for example, Marathi, Bengali and Hindi, are all derived from Sanskrit. The southern languages, on the other hand, are all from the completely unrelated Dravidian root.

  It used to be thought that the Aryans were the only begetters of Indian civilization. A century ago, as European imperialists sought validation of their domination of far older cultures, they lighted on the Aryans as their progenitors. As the authors of the oldest scriptures in world, in some sense the Indian Brahminical sages could be seen as standing at the root of Indo-European as well as Indian culture. Out of all this German Indologists in particular extracted crackpot ideas about the core values of Teutonic society, and weird racialist theories about the supremacy of the Aryan over the Semitic and the African; it was the ideological foundation of the Aryan ideas used by the Nazis.

  But of course the real history was much more rich, complex and elusive. Already in the 1920s the discovery of a great literate urban civilization in the Indus Valley in the Bronze Age – long before the ‘Aryan’ arrival in India – had thrown into question the relative contributions of the ‘Aryan’ and the Dravidian to India’s cultural make-up. Even today the significance of these sensational discoveries is the subject of passionate debate, and not just among scholars.

  Many now believe, surely rightly, that some of the oldest conceptions (perhaps we should say obsessions?) of Indian civilization, are pre-Aryan: yoga, tantra, the worship of the goddess – and perhaps, too, one of the most characteristic Hindu ideas, ahimsa, non-violence. Transmitted through Buddhism to medieval Hinduism and on to the likes of Gandhi, it is still alive today. Some ideas are probably even earlier. The Great God Siva, who has long been suspected as being pre-Aryan, may be pre-Dravidian too, if the Mesolithic dancing shaman in the caves of Bhimbetka is anything to go by, with his trident, horns and bangles. The elephant-headed Ganesh and the monkey-faced Hanuman are presumably far older than Indo-European religion in India. Indeed the more archaeologists discover, the more the bounds can be pushed back.

  So it was from these prehistoric substrates, along with their own particular genius, that the Tamils built their civilization, later assimilating Sanskritic culture to their own. And whatever profound influences the Sanskritic, Islamic and Christian may have exerted – and however much we discount the nationalist myths of today’s Dravidian politicians – it is still true to say that there has been a continuous and relatively unbroken development of civilization in the south from prehistory to the present day.

  The distinctive qualities of a civilization are often as much the product of landscape and climate as of history. Tamil civilization arose in a climate of fierce extremes, in particular the enervating annual cycle of autumn monsoons and scorching summer heat. The blessings of nat
ure here are superabundant, but they are also unpredictable and can be taken away with terrifying violence, especially in the years of cyclones, which can be absolutely devastating. The effect of living with such extremes is everywhere to be seen in the Tamil thought world; in their myths and beliefs, in their attitudes to love and sex, nature and society. There is a deeprooted preoccupation with extremes, and the need to control them. So theirs is a culture which values restraint, both in its psychological and its material life. A central practical concern, for example, is the control of water, and for this reason Tamil Nadu is pre-eminently a land of tanks and irrigation.

  By the end of summer here the rivers are mostly dry and one may walk across the bed of the Vaigai in the middle of Madurai. Even the main flood of the Cavery, the Coleroon, is reduced to a shallow flow and intermittent pools; the paddy-fields are burned up, bone-hard, brown, the rutted tracks hard as iron on bare feet. Then, when the tremendous rains come at monsoon time, ’when the rains fall on the red earth’, as the Tamil poets say, the rivers rise and fill up the tanks everywhere. Every village, every temple, has a tank, an artificial reservoir, a brick- or stone-lined pool with steps, and a covered mandapa to give shade. These are a source of water throughout the rest of the year, where people drink, wash and bathe, and where the children swim and play. You pass them all the way down on the train: there are thirty thousand registered by the state government in Tamil Nadu, leaving aside uncountable numbers of smaller ponds and pools. Virtually all are pre eighteenth century, and some still in use go back as far as the seventh century, still carrying their weathered inscriptions which testify to the civic spirit of thousand-year-old management committees. The tank which feeds Chidambaram, for example, was built in the eleventh century and will continue to be the biggest man-made lake in India until the Narmada dam is finished.

  Not surprisingly, water has long been viewed here as sacred; the act of purification by washing is the central ritual act of Hindus’ daily worship, which no Indian omits to do. Unlike most cultures they never lost this idea of the sacrality, the life-giving force of water. The Tamil lands are ringed by sacred bathing places, streams, shores, waterfalls, rivers and tanks. Rivers in particular were and are viewed as sacred; and the Cavery above all is revered by Tamils as Ponni, ‘the Lady of Gold’, a form of ‘liquid Sakti’, or divine energy, which nurtures the people. It was praised in poetry as far back as the time of the Roman empire, and still today, on the eighteenth day of the solar month Adi, in the middle of the heat (in late July), Tamils celebrate the rising of the Cavery, which is considered to happen punctually on this day every year. ‘To be on the banks of the Cavery listening to the strains of southern music,’ says a Tamil proverb, ‘is to have a taste of eternal bliss.’

  So in this climate and landscape, with its natural boundaries of sea and mountain, and the austere plateau of the Deccan, Tamil civilization arose. It was made by a people with deep roots in their landscape, possessed of an ancient, copious and versatile language and a profound sense of beauty. Its first flowering is known through a remarkable body of classical poetry which was largely rediscovered in the nineteenth century, the so-called Sangam poems, which fertilized all that followed. And what followed was remarkable. From then on until today there has been a continuous flood of great literature in Tamil, poetry, epics, grammars, drama and philosophy, including a rich Muslim Tamil literature.

  The greatest era of the south is generally agreed to have been the Chola dynasty between the ninth and thirteenth centuries; an era which has been compared (not entirely unjustly) to Renaissance Italy and classical Greece, both for the range of its creations and the astonishing fertility of its imagination. The Chola period is still alive in the minds of traditional Tamils. Its kings and saints are still real people in a way found in few other societies now. The oral poetry of the saints, which was strongly rooted in classical poetry, is a still-living tradition, not only in temples and religious houses, but also in popular culture. In the fifties and sixties, for example, many hit movies were based on its stories, and Sivaji Ganeshan, the greatest character actor of southern cinema, played wandering saints like Sundaramurti in his days as a juvenile lead. The greatest of all Tamil literary works, the twelfth-century epic of Kamban, is also still recited in folk plays; it receives earthy but careful exegesis from the actors, incorporating what appear to be genuine oral traditions of the author or himself and of the circumstances of its composition.

  The riches of southern culture were virtually unknown to the outside world until the nineteenth century. From then on, as more of the ancient texts became available (and they are still being recovered), the extent of the achievement of Tamil civilization became apparent. Tamil Nadu now appears to be one of the great classical cultures – perhaps, indeed, the last one. The fact that these traditions are still alive in the late twentieth century makes a journey to Tamil Nadu all the more charged with expectation for the interested outsider. The train journey south to Chidambaram and the Cavery takes you into its heartland.

  THE CITY OF THE COSMIC DANCE

  Late in the afternoon we crossed the Vellar river, and entered the northern edge of the Cavery delta; here you meet the landscape of rice paddies and palm forests, but the soil was parched and dry after a summer of no rain. Long lines of acacia palms stretched as far as the eye could see, lining the horizon. Brilliant white egrets in the brown fields; a pair of yoked bullocks with bright blue painted horns swaying across parched red earth; brightly painted plaster shrines – to horse deities and red-skinned moustachioed demigods – sitting in little thatched compounds among the trees. Then at last, still several miles off, we glimpsed the temple towers over the darkening palm forests.

  It was dusk when we reached Chidambaram. An elderly couple got off, assisted by a wiry and even older porter in an orange turban, who helped them to the cycle rickshaws outside. On the platform, by the door to the station master’s office, is a glittering weighing machine with mirrors and whirring coloured wheels which tells your fortune on a printed card. (‘You will find the joy of reciprocated love.’ On the reverse: ‘Remember to flush the lavatory: antisocial behaviour costs us all.’) Above it is a glass case containing a brightly painted statue of Nataraja performing his dance of bliss: ‘Welcome to the city of the Cosmic Dance’. Around the station you will also find Vishnu and Kali, and the symbols of other faiths, including Islam and Christianity: Southern Railways is nothing if not eclectic. But Siva is the great god of Chidambaram and, as if to emphasize it, Nataraja surmounts the roof outside beneath a little gopura where the station name glows in neon in English and Tamil. Facing him, his faithful bull Nandi sits in a roundabout across a dusty forecourt, where the cycle rickshaws queue patiently for the infrequent trains, ringing their bells in hopeful unison when any passer-by emerges from the booking-hall.

  The dusty station road led along a fence draped with bougainvillea, past darkened pilgrims’ hostels, all empty at this time of year. Only a century ago there used to be nearly seventy such establishments in Chidambaram; only about a dozen are still functioning. Not that the number of people on pilgrimage has lessened – far from it. With mass transport, pilgrimage is booming; it is just that it is quicker now, and few need or wish to stay in places like Chidambaram for more than a few hours. But at festival time in these places Hindu charitable organizations still feed and shelter the holy men and women who constantly wander the roads of India in their millions. I booked a room with a roof fan in the Hotel Tamil Nadu and strolled over the canal bridge into town. In the main street the sweet shops and flower stalls glowed in pools of lamplight: stacks of marigold, jasmine, roses, and slabs of sweets, bright yellow, white, orange and green. At the almond milk stall, the chubby-faced proprietor was preparing the first bowl of the evening, stirring the crumbled nuts into steaming creamy froth, a small-town Vishnu stirring his sea of milk.

  I had a dosa, a rice pancake, on a banana-leaf plate at the New Carrier Tiffin Centre (so called because it stands on the corn
er by Gandhi’s statue). Under a corrugated sheet, an ailing neon strip sputtered fitfully as a family of albino lizards scampered down the wall to eye the clientele. At the back, through a curtain of plastic strips, was the interior of the kitchen: a dark hovel bathed in firelight from a big clay kiln, where a grizzled old man, barechested and glistening with sweat, expertly tossed wafer thin dosas on to a flat steel griddle. Across the road, distorted film music swelled and crashed at the Lena cinema as the early evening show churned out the latest iddly western. Around the statue of Gandhi auto-rickshaws did battle, horns blaring, like a scene from the TV ‘Mahabharata’. Clouds of dust were rising in the last pink light behind the cinema. Meanwhile, ignored by all, the Mahatma strode forward confidently into an uncertain future, faded circlets of flowers still hung round his neck from his birthday celebrations.

  Soon the great mass of the east tower of the temple reared up black against the starry sky, gilded finials glinting. Inside, the wide courtyard was open to the sky. To the right the hall with a thousand pillars, and beyond it the huge tank, glinting in the moonlight; in the interior, granite corridors stretched off into the darkness, peopled by beardless androgynes, dressed in white loincloths with shaved foreheads, their long shiny black hair worn in a tight bun to one side, half-man, half-woman. As one old British administrator remembered them: ‘sleek well-grown fellows… the boys pretty neophytes in white clothing, their sallow shapeliness especially charming. The younger ones reminded me of Italian angels.’