A South Indian Journey

by Michael Wood

  The wonders of Indian Muslim art remain emphatically Indian. When we see the gorgeously half-human Buraq, or the Shia Imam Ali represented as an avatar of Vishnu at Lucknow or Hyderabad, or even the Prophet himself with the attributes of Krishna (as he appears in Tamil literary epic), we understand that in India Muslim art could never quite break with the Hindu vision.

  Islam’s battle with representational art makes a long and fascinating story. It starts as early as the remarkable Hellenistic-style figural art from early Islamic Jordan. Later, in the fertile artistic climate of medieval Persia, the iconoclasts could only ever have been partially successful. Here in India they were forced to give way before the overwhelming need to make images of everything.

  In the busy main street Mala paced up and down searching for a good eating place. Though she was not taking food herself, she was concerned that I had a clean place with good cooking. Eventually we found brightly lit ‘hotel’ with dosai and she watched me eat. She looked tired: but then she was now in her third day of fasting. I asked her about the legend of Andal, the patron saint of the town. It turned out to be a tale which rather resembled that of the bride of Christ, Teresa of Avila, though with distinctly erotic undertones.

  ‘Andal was a foundling girl, discovered in a basket by the river: she was fostered by a priest at the temple.

  ‘From very young age she was seized by the desire to marry Vishnu. Secretly each morning she was decking herself in the fresh garlands with which her foster-father was supposed to adorn the image of Vishnu. This was sacrilege, as it is forbidden for anyone even to smell fresh flowers which are to be dedicated to the deity.’

  The girl would fantasize about union with Vishnu: what it would be like. (‘What will his kiss be like: does it taste like fresh lotus blossom, or camphor? Or is it as sweet as honey?’) When she put on the flowers, she would look in the mirror to see if she was lovely enough to be his bride. She saw nothing wrong in this: she was pure-hearted. Certain of her poems indeed are frankly erotic (‘Enter me and leave the imprint of your saffron paste on my breasts… mixing, churning, maddening me inside’). Mala says these are less well known, and not often publicly performed.

  The waiter came over to lay a fresh green plantain leaf on my table, which I sprinkled and brushed with water, leaving a shower of tiny droplets over the soft matt ribbed surface of the leaf. Then my special dosa arrived: a crisp pancake of ground rice and lentils, two feet across. I discovered I was ravenous. Mala continued the story.

  ‘When her foster-father discovered her sacrilege, he was upset and prayed to Vishnu to ask him what to do. Vishnu then appeared to him in a dream saying that Andal gave an added fragrance to the flowers which was dear to him. So she was blessed, chosen by god. Aged sixteen she went to the island of Srirangam, the greatest Vishnu shrine in India, and vanished in the sanctum; she was never seen again. Taken by God.’

  (Andal’s cult had already spread across the Tamil lands by the twelfth century, when there were special recitals of her works. Later generations could not resist filling in the gaps in the tale by providing love letters to her from Vishnu.)

  ‘In Margali month, which is December time, all over Tamil Nadu she is celebrated every morning on the radio; there are recitations of her Tiruppavai poem in temples and at home gatherings. You can buy it on cassette. Young girls especially sing verses of it to make a happy marriage; often they make vows to rise before dawn each day to bathe and recite the entire poem. Each morning a special puja is still done here, where garlands are put on Vishnu after first being put on Andal; this is in memory of the tale.’

  As always, Mala had infinite patience with my questions. Where, I wondered, had all this knowledge come from. Had she always been religious like this? It was something I had never asked. She answered by going back into her past life:

  ‘After we married in 1959, my husband worked as a clerk in Pondicherry, and the children were brought up there until the loss of his sight during the late seventies and early eighties led to him losing his job and returning to Chidambaram on a tiny disability pension to live. It was then, about twelve years ago, I started to find out more.’

  ‘So when your husband went blind?’

  ‘From that time I started to question an old religious lady in the town about the religious stories. She was a widow, over seventy years old. She knew the poems of the saints, the Tevaram, and had visited most of the sites in their sacred journeys. She was also a Saiva.’

  (Among Tamils, I should add, you will often find a sense that Saivism is the indigenous religion of the south; Vaishnavism is more identified with the Sanskritic, Brahminical, pan-Indian culture, especially in the figures of Rama and Krishna. Saiva is held to be the ‘old religion’ and this has left its marks in the language. For example, when you sit down at table to eat vegetarian food, as we were doing, this is called in Tamil ‘Saiva sapede’, ‘Saiva food’.) Mala continued her tale as I demolished my dosa and ordered another.

  ‘Till then I had been religious, but only as most people are in our community. But from that time I became filled with the desire to know.’

  So she started to learn all the sthalapuranas, the myths of the individual temples, the special qualities of the different shrines. Following the sacred paths, she made trips all over the south, scrutinizing the almanac and mastering the seasonal calendar for festivals, eclipses, days of largesse, days of abstinence, the special properties of vilva, neem and pipal. She could recite all the great sites and days: the sacred marriage in Madurai in May; Tiruvannamali in November, when a huge fire burns for three days and nights on the summit of the pyramidal mass of the Red Mountain, which rises sheer out of the central plain; Tirupugalur in April, when, in one of the most enthralling rites anywhere in India, Appar is celebrated at the very time and place of his death, in the sanctum in the dead of night, when the lights are extinguished and his last poem is recited: ‘Lord now I am come to your lotus feet.’

  These values she had passed on to her children. Yet at the same time she had fought to give her four daughters the best secular education they could manage. She had got Bharati into technical college in Nagapattinam, and when relatives wouldn’t help take her there, Mala took her there herself. She wanted to equip them for the modern world, even though she herself was still committed to the old ways of caste and stars. For her the two were by no means incompatible. She still believed, for example, that this was the best way of finding a good husband, a compatible person for a marriage within the community; ‘god will make sure you get on.’ So she took on the male duties of householder, while falling back on the old powers to shore things up, keep things from breaking apart, protect the family and children in hard times. Yet in the end in her heart of hearts I suspect she knew that only hard work could mitigate the pains that flesh is heir to.

  It was time to go. We trooped back on to the bus for the last journey of the day – three hours more to Tirupparakunram. Even Mala was nodding by now. A tiring business, the pilgrimage.

  THE ROCK OF SIKANDER

  Towards one we turned off the Madurai road into the long lane which leads up to the temple and the great rock. They had had no rain here, and when we got down from the bus there was soft dry sand between the toes. The street was gaily decorated for the temple festival, hung with flags and figured cloths; in the middle was a big marquee canopied with sewn elephants and peacocks. Beyond was the entrance gopura draped in fairy lights. Tirupparakunram is another of the abodes of Murugan and was in the middle of the same ten-day celebration that we had seen at Tiruchendur. A lovely atmosphere lingered around the late tea stalls as we asked around to find somewhere to stay. There was no room in the first choultries we asked. One was for Brahmins only. We of course were of many castes (though there were no untouchables on the bus). Finally Mr Ramasamy came out of a darkened building with a sleepy-looking choultry manager, and we were ushered into an old-style pilgrim lodge on the approach to the temple: they had a vacant communal room upstairs: a hundred rup
ees for the whole party.

  We found ourselves in a columned entrance hall with latticed screens over the windows; on either side a narrow stone staircase led to the first floor where there was a long dormitory with a hard floor of painted lime plaster. A heavy old fan with a nose like a Spitfire propeller wobbled alarmingly in the roof. The first ones to get up the stairs had already earmarked the floor underneath it. We made space for ourselves, spreading our dhotis or sari cloths on the floor ready to lie down for the rest of the night, women, children, men all mixed up together. The wash place was outside, downstairs at the back; it was rather like the backyard of a temple, with water drawn in buckets from a stone tank under a starry sky. To one side was a row of cubicles for loos which in no time were hung with sari cloths. I stretched out to get some sleep while Mr Ramasamy delivered the next day’s programme. I’d brought a mosquito net, but somehow I’d have felt a bit of a cissy trying to use it. In any case, where would one hang it? Now it came into its own as a pillow. Mr Ramasamy came over:

  ‘Here’s a good joke for you, Mr Michael. One lady says to her neighbour: “I like your new milkman; he is handsome as a movie star: What’s his name?” Neighbour replies: “Paul Newman”.’ (He pronounced Paul as Paal).

  A blank look from the floor.

  ‘I don’t get it, Mr Ramasamy,’ I said.

  ‘In Tamil paal is milk. See? Paal Newman–new milkman! Good?’

  He shrugged his shoulders despairingly. ‘Mr Michael, you are needing to learn much more Tamil if you are to enjoy the Tamil sense of humour.’

  I slept like a log till 4.30 when Mr Ramasamy’s wake-up call interrupted my dreams of many-armed gods and goddesses and smiling anthropomorphs. We had the usual two hours to go through our ablutions before the first puja in the temple. The washing area was crowded by the time I got down. Raja had another plan. The temple itself had a particularly spacious bathing tank which would be great for an early morning bath. Did I fancy that? Certainly, I said. They didn’t offer to show me the way. So off I went on my own at five, still pitch dark, in a thin, small dhoti clutching my soap box, walking down the streets of Tirupparakunram. The air was blissfully fresh and cool. I got a cheery wave from the tea stalls where they were heating up the first brew of the day. But otherwise, no one paid the slightest bit of notice to this thin foreign body, pale as a ghost, wandering their streets in search of a holy bath.

  I found it at last, a lake-sized reservoir with stepped sides and a columned mandapa on an island in the middle. As the sky faintly lightened to the east, I could see that it was cut mainly out of the living rock and filled by water courses which channelled rainwater off the great bare shoulders of the hill – cold, deep water into which I did not wish to stray too far in the darkness. The water closed over my head with exhilarating sharpness. Standing up I sucked in my breath and swore to myself in pleasure; after a short while I tried to climb out, and feeling for the slimy steps I tripped and fell over.

  ‘Bugger.’

  ‘You are from which country?’ said a sudden voice from nowhere. White short-sleeved shirt and whites of eyes; gradually I made out a young man clutching a spring folder. Naked and dripping I picked myself up, grabbed my dhoti, and tried to look perfectly normal while he stared, faintly bemused, and kept the conversation going with series of questions. It transpired he was on the way to the bus stand to go to the college in Madurai where he was studying English literature.

  ‘Did you see Mr Peter Prook’s Mahabharata?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘What is your opinion?’

  ‘I saw the stage show: very exciting. Loved it when they set the stage on fire. What did you think?’

  His face puckered.

  ‘This was cheap magic. Not satisfactory. Generally it was not liked in India. How can you put the world’s longest poem into seven hours when recital takes seven days? Also Indian people do not behave like these actors. And Bhima was played by an African; this did not go down at all well with an Indian audience. Bhima has a wheaten complexion; he is not a black man. We consider the TV version of Mr Ramanand Sagar was wholly preferable.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, squeezing out my wet dhoti and wrapping myself with the towel. I squeezed out some toothpaste and brushed vigorously.

  ‘They spoke like gods to start with. In epic style. We did not understand it all. Even the actors did not understand it all. But it was in the language of the gods. Every Sunday morning people even did their pujas in front of the TV screen. Ninety episodes. It was biggest-ever audience on TV. Even the Muslims were fans.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Also they looked like gods. You see we know what gods look like,’ he said, with absolute certainty.

  ‘Krishna in particular is strong, majestic, powerful and noble. And he is blue. This Krishna was the wrong colour. This is the last straw. You might as well have had Prince Hamlet played by a girl.’

  ‘Actually we have.’

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘this only proves the point. You have lost touch with your tradition. The important thing is not innovation, but following of the tradition. In India this is what the people love best. Mr Brook’s Krishna was strong and powerful. But he did not speak like the god. And he was the wrong colour.’

  I made as if to go.

  ‘Do you have a visiting card?’

  I rummaged vainly for a moment in imaginary pockets.

  ‘I’m sorry… I’m afraid I didn’t bring one.’

  The light was coming up fast now on the brown pyramid of rock behind us. I scribbled my address on his pad, and agreed to correspond further on the matter of Mr Brook’s dramaturgy. I then hurried back to meet Mala and Minakshi and her aunt and grandmother at the tea stall by the temple gate.

  The temple at Tirupparakunram is another ancient and famous place on the Tamil pilgrimage routes. It is dramatically situated at the bottom of a precipitous granite rock known as Skandamalai, which rises over 1000 feet straight out of the plain. The rock is dotted with ancient caves and rock sanctuaries and holy springs; it has been a place of worship since prehistory and sacred at one time or other to Saivites, Vaishnavites, Jains and Muslims. Orthodox pilgrims not only climb it but circumambulate the base where there is a path with wayside shrines. Right on top there is an old Muslim tomb which is still visited and revered by Muslim pilgrims from the region; they call the hill Sikandermalai, ‘the rock of Sikander’, the Indian name for Alexander the Great. The tomb, however, dates from the brief and dramatic heyday of the Madura sultanate when Tirupparakunram was the capital of the Muslim state down here; it was the scene of one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the south. The tale takes us back to one of the most momentous events in the long history of India, the coming of Islam.

  Muslim armies reached the Indus valley in 711, less than a century after the Prophet’s death. Between the tenth and twelfth centuries the Muslims overthrew the Hindu kingdoms of northern India in a bloody and traumatic irruption into Indian life, severing the people for ever from their native religions. But in the south this period was the zenith of Cholan power and achievement, with its unsurpassed temple architecture, bronze and stone sculpture, and literature. The Cholan navy ensured the south remained inviolate; in 1017 they even sent an army to the Ganges. At that time the kingdom based on Tanjore on the Cavery river conquered Sri Lanka and despatched fleets to the Maldives, Java, Sumatra and Malaya, leaving Hindu culture, which has survived till today in islands such as Bali. Their mercantile embassies visited Sung China and Chinese junks came to the Coromandel coast to trade their silk and porcelain – which is still found by the beachcomber, pounded into the surf line at the mouth of the Cavery.

  Until the end of the twelfth century the Tamils were still a strong and wealthy naval power, people with whom the Chinese could do business, unlike the later Western buccaneers and entrepreneurs. For unlike the Westerners they were people who had not dispensed with their rituals, and in Chinese eyes this was the chief
mark of a civilized people.

  But through the 1200s, even as the last great building projects were under way at Chidambaram, Cholan power began to decline and the Muslim rulers of north India began to eye their wealth covetously. By now, of course, Islam was dominant from the Mediterranean to the Ganges. In the early fourteenth century the first large-scale attempt was made to attack the south. Plunder was no doubt the first objective. Sultan Allauddin Khilji of Delhi must have heard of the great temples and the extraordinary treasures kept in them; at Tanjore alone Rajaraja the Great had given 400 pounds of gold to his temple in 1010, along with many other treasures which were still there three centuries later. And Tanjore was just one temple among thousands. With the south now riven by civil war, and the Cholan dynasty in terminal decline, the chance must have seemed too good to resist.

  The campaign against the south by the sultan’s general Malik Kafur began on 18 November 1310 and lasted for a full year, during which the southern Tamil lands were overrun, temples demolished, towns looted. In January 1311 they hit Trichy and attacked the great temple of Vishnu on the sacred island of Srirangam. The temple staff had no time to flee and a terrible massacre took place. The temple chronicle records the events of the time. A strange legend still told by the temple priests told how the cult statue of Vishnu was taken to Delhi, where it was rescued by a Muslim princess who fell in love with the face of the Lord and eventually restored it to the temple.