On a Shoestring to Coorg

by Dervla Murphy

  Next, the Poludu Kuthu (a special wooden vessel) was filled with sheaves and placed on the head of the young man – Tim’s son – who had been chosen for the great honour of carrying it back to the house. Other sheaves were handed to everyone present and I found it deeply moving to walk with the rest towards the threshing-yard holding those cool, dew-wet stalks, which collectively mean so much to some 500 million Indians. It is impossible, against the Coorg background, to think of this ceremony as merely ‘a quaint local custom’ or ‘interesting old superstition’. Perhaps it is no more than that: perhaps all religious ritual everywhere is no more than that – who knows? But, if there is a God, then I think we came close to him tonight as we stood chanting in the moonlight.

  Marking the centre of each Coorg threshing-floor is a plain stone pillar about four feet high, around which, for Huthri, an elaborate pattern is drawn on the ground with white chalk. I took off my shoes at this stage, to join in the prayerful procession, and we circled the pillar three times before laying our paddy at its base while Mrs Thimmiah performed another puja. Then we picked the sheaves up again and climbed the steep path through the coffee back to the house, to lay them finally beneath the sacred wall-lamp. Before entering the house the Kuthi-bearer paused on the threshold to have his feet washed by Sita – the unmarried daughter – and to receive from her a drink of milk. He then laid the Kuthi on the mat below the lamp and, after a few moments, several young servants took some of the new paddy to weave it into garlands which were placed on every door-handle and window-latch in the house.

  Having saluted his elders and received their blessings the Kuthi-bearer went into the kitchen to mix a dough known as Elakki Puttu. This consists of rice-flour, fried gingelly seeds, bitter-gourd peel, grated coconut, mashed plantain, milk, honey and some tiny pebbles and coins, added for much the same reason as we add foreign objects to our barm bracks or Christmas puddings. I had followed the Kuthi-bearer and I watched as he placed a little dough on six peepul leaves (one for each resident member of the family) and threw the leaves at the ceiling, calling the name of an ancestor at each throw. All the little balls stuck, which means the ancestors are well pleased with their descendants. And so they should be, in this family.

  Meanwhile, two wooden trestle tables had been laid with shiny squares of plantain leaf in the Nellakki Nadubade, and Sita was peeling a few grains from the new crop. She added these to a sweet porridge of which she placed a portion on a leaf – with a morsel from each of the seven ceremonial dishes we were about to eat – as an offering to the ancestors, and when we had all taken our seats Tim asked ritualistically, ‘Shall we partake of the new crop?’ We then did so, by eating a little porridge; and I came on a pebble and a coin which means I am to live long and become rich.

  I certainly feel rich tonight, though my new wealth has nothing to do with coins. Occasionally the traveller chances on an experience that seems enormously important, even if its significance cannot easily be expressed or explained, and though nothing could be simpler than these Huthri ceremonies I know I shall never forget them. Altogether apart from the feeling engendered – which was so genuinely religious, in its joyous, primitive way – the sheer visual beauty of that paddy-cutting ritual was overwhelming. The Coorgs are a handsome race and all those fine faces, seen in profile against the darkness by the light of flaring torches, made a picture that would have inspired Rembrandt. Nor was there any intrusive twentieth-century detail to spoil the vision of Sita, superb in a Coorg sari of crimson silk, following her mother – a slim figure in silver – as Mrs Thimmiah bore that flickering dish-lamp along the narrow path while the workers’ happy, rhythmic, full-throated chanting went echoing across the valley.

  Probably, however, it is a mistake to consider the religious feeling and the visual scene as separate phenomena. Very likely they are interdependent, people responding to the one all the more readily because of the other. The builders of the great cathedrals seem to have known a thing or two about this matter, though my impression is that modern architects understand it only imperfectly. But perhaps thirteenth-century conservatives thought Chartres disgustingly eccentric and irreverent.

  10 December

  I woke at dawn this morning, despite having been so late to bed, and went for a solitary walk through the early freshness of coffee-plantation, paddy-valley and bird-busy forest. And I wondered, as I walked, what the Huthri festival now means to Westernised Coorgs. More, I suspect, than Christmas now means to many Christians – though one might not think so to see the Thimmiahs lounging about in their jeans and T-shirts while sipping their cocktails, reading their New Yorkers, listening to their stereo Johann Strauss and conversing in their Cambridge English (the first language of the Coorg élite). It interests me that so many Coorgs seem emotionally and intellectually capable of moving from East to West and back again without showing any sign of inner conflict or loss of integrity. This is a facility more usually found in practice amongst Muslims than amongst Hindus, though in theory the Hindu philosophy should be the more conducive to it.

  As we sat on the veranda last evening, watching the dancers, I was very conscious of the chasm between Indian landowners and labourers; but later, when we were all in the fields, at the heart of the Huthri ceremonies, I realised that at a certain level there is less of a chasm here than in Europe. Landowners and labourers recognise each other as being equally important, in different ways, and – at least where this family is concerned – are truly united in mutual loyalty and respect.

  A Socialist would of course be appalled by the Coorg scene, which is as shamelessly feudal as anything I have ever come across. Tim talks cheerfully about ‘allowing my people to smoke’ or ‘forbidding my people to gamble’ as though democracy died with the City States. On the other hand, in addition to a just wage he gives ‘his people’ generous paddy rations for two meals a day, subsidises their weddings and funerals, pays their medical expenses when they fall ill and has so organised their lives that few of them are ever in debt though throughout India millions of agricultural labourers spend most of their lives in the grip of money-lenders. According to himself, Tim is an ‘average’ Coorg landowner and I would like to be able to believe this. He once stood for parliament, causing the local Congress candidate to lose his deposit, but the wheeling and dealing of politics so disgusted him that he soon left the democratic arena to concentrate on doing his own feudal thing.

  Contrary to my usual custom – but not surprisingly – I slept after lunch and woke to hear music in the distance. The bandsmen and singers had returned for a ritual praising of the family, from the founder-ancestor, called the Karona, down to the youngest living grandson, aged three. As I write this (at 10 p.m.) the musicians are still sitting on long benches against the wall in the prayer-room, chanting their strangely moving refrain, while the sacred lamp burns steadily before them. At intervals throughout the evening members of the assembled family went into the prayer-room and sat for a time, listening – and then returned to the veranda to get on with their game of scrabble. Tim has told me that tomorrow the ceremonial Huthri Dance of Seven Nads is to be held near by. He added, sadly, that since the cinema came to Virajpet the locals have been losing interest in their festivals and the quality of both music and dancing has deteriorated. In an effort to encourage the boys to learn from the men, he himself sometimes tours the nads; but even in Coorg mass-entertainment is winning.

  Rachel is 5 years old today and despite the inevitable shortage of cards and presents it was a most successful birthday, complete with home-made chocolate cake for tea.

  11 December.

  This really is superb walking country, with climate to match. I spent most of today on the move: before breakfast with Sita, Rachel and the dogs, after breakfast with Rachel, and after lunch on my own. In all directions little tracks run to and fro and up and down, across the paddy and through the coffee and over the steep slopes. And every turn of every path presents a new combination of the region’s beauties; blue mount
ains fortifying the horizon, protecting the peace of Coorg: long paddy-valleys lying between the dark green of the forested ridges like magic lakes of gold: wild heliotrope covering the open scrubland like a pale purple mist: neat acres of coffee fringed with lines of slim silver oaks and shaded by trees of an awesome height: and occasional handsome dwellings marked by warm red-brown tiles, gleaming white walls, groves of palms and plantains and cascades of bougainvillaea and poinsettia.

  This afternoon, as I walked alone, I thanked Fate for having guided me to Coorg. With a 5-year-old fellow-traveller I cannot seek out those remote areas which most appeal to me and it is rare indeed to find a ‘developed’ region free of brash advertisements, domineering pylons, strident petrol-stations, abundant litter, synthetic building materials and hideously artificial colours. But here, in this ‘finest of the kingdoms of Jambudwipa’ a civilised harmony still exists between landscape and people. So perfectly do the artistry of nature and of man complement each other that one feels miraculously restored to the Garden of Eden, to the world as it was before Eve ate the apple of technology.

  At about half past four I overtook several groups of friendly, curious, gracefully robed women who were also on their way to watch the Huthri dancing, due to begin soon on a level expanse of grassy common land. Beneath the solitary, giant sampige tree in the centre of the common, Rachel was awaiting me with a swarm of young friends she had somehow acquired since lunch-time, and she announced that the local Harijans were about to perform an overture to the formal Huthri dances.

  Then, on the far side of the common, a quartet of weirdly comic figures came bounding on to the grass. The leader was almost black-skinned, smeared all over with white chalk and naked from the waist up – apart from a battered trilby, an elaborate garland of orange flowers and a blatantly false beard of goat-hair. Around his waist he wore a ragged cotton miniskirt, held in place by a rope from which hung a dozen clanging pewter bells, and he had been kept well topped-up with a Arak during the past several days. He was followed by another man whose huge engaging grin revealed a magnificent mouthful of even white teeth and whose great bush of tangled hair may not have been as verminous as it looked. This character was clad in someone’s cast-off army shorts and had a moth-eaten tiger-skin draped across his ebony torso. Like his friends, he was brandishing a long wooden staff and exuding Arak fumes. The other two performers were tall youths disguised as women and even without knowing the language one soon gathered that this entertainment would not have amused a certain Empress of India.

  The adult Coorgs standing under the sampige rather pointedly ignored the Harijans as they gambolled, danced, yelled, sang, leaped high in the air and shook their long staffs. During a mock fight they rolled on the ground feigning mortal injuries (and feigning other things when the young ‘women’ fell beside them), while two small boys played a monotonous yet pleasing melody on long, curved horns. This boisterous, undisciplined clowning went on until the Coorg dancers appeared, forming a dramatic contrast to the Harijans as they crossed the common in a stately double line, their costumes immaculate, their bearing kingly, their movements, when the dancing began, stylised and gracious.

  Forty-two men from seven villages were taking part and all carried short bamboo canes with which they duelled ritualistically while dancing in a circle to music provided by the drummers and horn-players. The leading pair wore white, the rest black, and as those handsome men circled rhythmically against a background of mighty trees I reflected that seldom, in the 1970s, is folk dancing performed for fun – not self-consciously, to preserve customs, or cunningly, to please tourists. But my pleasure can never be unalloyed when I chance upon such fragile and doomed links with the past. One knows that before Rachel is grown even Coorg will have opted for that pseudo-culture which ‘kills time’ (grimly significant phrase) but leaves the spirit starving.

  Why do some people remain so passionately attached to traditional customs, while others can happily jettison them? The traditionalists, I suppose, are just silly romantic fools – or maybe cowards. It certainly frightens me to think that within my own lifetime customs which had survived for incalculable periods have been discarded in country after country, by race after race. Why should we assume that those links which previously bound the living to the dead are now worthless? It was only a few hours ago, under the sampige tree, that I glimpsed a possible answer to this question.

  The dancers were still indefatigably dancing, though the clear evening sky had changed from pale blue to faint apricot, and then to a strange and lovely shade of violet. And suddenly it seemed to me that because our world has been so radically altered within the past half-century many of those things we were bred to value are, quite simply, no longer valuable; in modern society they have no place, they fulfil no function. So they must go, as the leaves in the autumn, leaving us, unprotected, to face the consequences of our own terrifying ingenuity.

  Tomorrow we leave for a few weeks in the extreme south and Tim has guaranteed to have some suitably primitive accommodation organised for us on our return to Coorg.

  8

  A Glance at Kerala: Cochin’s Kathakali Dance

  12 December. Tellicherry.

  This morning’s journey from Virajpet to the Kerala state border was a continuous descent through dense forests where cardamom groves flourish in the undergrowth and not a trace of humanity is to be seen. On such roads I find it very hard to reconcile myself to bus travel.

  The border consists of a shallow, clear green river running over elephantine boulders at the bottom of a deep ravine. In a one-street village on the Kerala side the Karnataka State-run buses turn around to go home, leaving their passengers to board the Kerala buses, which also turn around here. Kerala’s rich green hills rise straight up from the village street and to the east looms the high blue bulk of the Ghats. This is the sort of hidden-away little place, with a ‘lost’ feeling, which I particularly enjoy.

  In the ramshackle mini-bazaar an astonishing amount of salted fish was on sale, and many baskets of fresh fish are brought every day by bus from the coast. At noon we went into a tiny eating-house and ate off plantain leaves provided by a little boy who carried them down the street on his head in a neat, freshly cut roll, tied with grass, and received 10 paise for his labour. Before the food was served each customer carefully washed his own ‘plate’ with a tumbler of water – letting the water run on to the earth floor – and after the meal he tossed his leaf over the balcony towards the river far below. If it landed in the bushes on the cliff-side it was immediately set upon by the local cats and crows, watched enviously by the local pi-dogs, who could not cope with the precipice.

  After lunch we set off to walk through lush magnificence until a bus overtook us. For a mile or so we had the river on our left and on our right were hibiscus and bamboo-clumps, marking the edge of the forest. Despite a total lack of cultivable land, quite a few little thatched dwellings, of mud-brick and/or coconut matting, had been erected along the edge of the precipice above the river. Their occupants were black-skinned, thick-lipped, curly haired, bright-eyed and well-built. Most of them greeted us cheerfully, when they had recovered from their incredulity on seeing a more or less white woman and child strolling down the road, but the toddlers were terrified and fled shrieking to the shelter of mother’s skirts.

  In countries as developed as India one expects ‘the media’ to have by now given everybody an approximate idea of what everybody else looks like. But of course this is nonsense in the case of – for instance – Kerala’s Ezhavas. Formerly these people were not merely ‘untouchable’ but ‘unapproachable’ and they are still a ‘Depressed Class’, to use the quaint official euphemism for impoverished groups who suffer from persisting (though now illegal) caste discrimination. The annual per capita income in Kerala is £26.30, so obviously the poorest class cannot afford to take their children to the coast, where they might glimpse foreign tourists or at least see pages from magazines, pasted on tea-house walls, which would give
them some visual idea of white people.

  We had been walking for about an hour when the countryside opened up. On every side stretched plantations of cashew and eucalyptus, groves of coconut-palms and plantains, low green scrub, stands of bamboo, patches of tapioca and the remnants of primeval forest where the black pepper vine thrives. One is overwhelmed here by the sheer abundance – the boundless exuberance – of Kerala’s fertility. It is as though the Lord of Creation had given way, at this point, to the promptings of a wild and joyous extravagance.

  We stopped at a cross-roads to drink scalding sweet tea in the shade of a lean-to decorated with crudely printed Communist posters and a large picture of St Francis Xavier looking uncharacteristically soulful. The Hammer and Sickle marked the crossroads, fluttering merrily atop a high bamboo flagstaff, and opposite the lean-to some twenty barefooted boys and girls were sitting on the ground outside a thatched schoolhouse, busily doing their English lesson. No teacher was in sight but they looked up from their studies only to help each other. I began then to believe all I had heard about the Malayalis’ devotion to scholarship. And when the bus picked us up half an hour later we had just passed a large, tree-surrounded convent school from which hundreds of girls were pouring like lava down the sides of some intellectual volcano. Observing them, I wondered what effect that molten stream was destined soon to have on the Communistic, under-employed Malayalis. But – looking ahead – volcanic soil is very fertile.