Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  “When a girl’s sent away for marriage at such a young age, she’ll start having children very young as well. That means more mothers will die giving birth, and more babies will die from premature birth or other weaknesses from having such a young mother,” says Kanchan Mathur, one of the social scientists who sponsored Bhanwari and other village women in Rajasthan’s Women’s Development Project.

  “Some of these girls are just ten years old. Their education comes to a halt when they’re married,” Mrs. Mathur says. “And what do these girls know of sex? They have no idea what’s happening to them.”

  Jim Landers led the Dallas Morning News team that won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1994 for a series of articles on violence against women and human rights. He is now a columnist for the newspaper.

  Sujata was working. She squatted beside a woman in front of her mud-walled home. They conferred in low voices and drew figures in the dirt. Messages would be passed from person to person; there were no telephones. In the time I might have made forty or fifty phone calls at home, we walked two villages and met with three or four women. I was awed by the slow pace and wondered how long it would take to get these things done. What could they accomplish on foot with no telephones?

  Quite a bit.

  Thrift societies, organized by village women, have broken the stranglehold of the money lenders and enabled families to buy their land and invest in farm animals and basic equipment. Child-care centers and nutrition programs crack the cycle of illiteracy. Wasteland development projects reclaim eroded land and return it to productive use. Appropriate technology projects, such as windmills and biogas, make use of precious natural resources.

  —Thalia Zepatos, A Journey of One’s Own: Uncommon Advice for the Independent Woman Traveler

  PART FIVE

  THE LAST WORD

  Kanya Kumari

  GEOFFREY MOORHOUSE

  There is no better place to get a sense of India’s many-leveled vastness than from its southernmost point, a spot of power and purity.

  THIS IS WHERE INDIA BEGINS. ON THIS CURVE OF LAND, WHOSE strained shore is washed by the jade green sea, an entire subcontinent is poised as if upon a sharpened point. Navigators rounded it in ancient times when extending the boundaries of the known world, among them the Greeks, whose geographer Ptolemy identified this extremity as Koμαρια ακρoν—ultimate Komari. Behind those early voyagers was an emptiness of ocean, separating the subcontinent from Africa; ahead, the tear-drop shape of Taprobane, which we now call Sri Lanka. Yet this was no barren headland, valuable only because it gave mariners their bearings. Just offshore, beating their way home against high winds and curling white water, are fisherman whose ancestors have worked this coast for centuries. Their craft are the same today as they always have been: a few tree trunks lashed together, with a bamboo pole bending to the pull of a swollen brown lateen. A line of them cant at such an angle to the waves that their shapes are transformed, so that from the shore they have the appearance of beetles crawling across the stormy sea. Men balance on these vessels like acrobats, gripping the slippery logs with fiercely splayed toes. And slowly they make their way into the lee of the land, to the beach lying beside the subcontinent’s most southerly point, and the huddle of white-walled houses rising in terraces above. The sand is well studded with rocks which, at low tide, become increasingly coated with yellow slime, as the fisherfolk squat on them and empty their bowels. As the sea flows into and over the shore, all is miraculously cleansed, so that with the ebbing of the tide the illusion of purity is established again.

  Purity matters here. This is a holy place, and the most ardent of the pilgrims who travel the length and breadth of the subcontinent to reach it are obsessed, above all, with what is pure and what is impure. Such considerations can shape their whole lives, everything they do, all that happens to them from conception to the pyre. And yet they live by paradox, as do no other people on earth; so that anyone utterly and shamefully defiled will only be made acceptable again by consuming a potion made from five substances emitted by the cow, including its dung and its piss. Urine is seen as the best purifier of any uncleanliness by the very people who speak of the left hand—in the Tamil tongue native to this holy place—as “the hand of filth.”

  The pilgrims come by train and by bus, entering the sacred precincts down a narrow road lined by hoardings which clamour to sell accommodation, handicrafts, gimcrack souvenirs, food. Another exhortation more soberly advises them to Beware of Thieves. People pause beside stalls offering bananas, ugly plastic toys, and seashells which have been gaudied with paint and glued together to resemble rabbits, elephants, butterflies, and boss-eyed fish. Persistent young men waylay each newcomer and attempt to press postcards, transparencies, sunglasses, beads upon all who do not wave them aside contemptuously. Beggars position themselves artfully where they are almost impossible to avoid. The air swirls with dust blown up by gusts of wind off the sea, and it tantalises the hungry with promising smells of woodsmoke and spicy things ready to eat. It is deafening with sounds that are neither Indian nor musical, merely amplified noise which mutilates the ears.

  At the bottom of that road rises a wedge-shaped gopuram above the principal shrine. This is dedicated to Parvati, who was betrothed to Lord Shiva but lost his hand in marriage through some trickery of the gods, who required her to slay the demon king, a feat that could only be managed by one destined to remain for ever kumari—virginally pure; in another version of the myth, Parvati came here to do penance in order to be worthy of her god but, being nevertheless rejected, she vowed to embrace celibacy to the end of her days. Endlessly the crowds do homage to this immaculate deity, where she sits on her temple throne, her diamond nose-rings glittering in the lamplight, her visible features embalmed in sandalpaste.

  Then most of them board a hazardous old bucket with its wheelhouse aft, which lurches across the short space of tumultuous water separating the land from an enormous rock. This is surmounted by a domed building of much more recent origin than the temple of Kumari. It marks the place where the Swami Vivekenanda meditated for several months in 1892 upon the syncretistic teachings of his guru Ramakrishna, lately dead, until he reached the conclusion that he must take enlightenment to the West; which he did the following year at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. The West, holding narrower views than his, had much earlier staked its own claim by building a Portuguese church above the pink pantiled roofs of the fishing village, which faced the Bengali sage as he sat and pondered possibilities before making eagerly for the impressionable warmth of America. Hundreds every day cross the water to be with the spirit of Vivekananda, and to make their obeisance to the sacred Sanskrit characters graven in stone; while in the all but empty dolly-blue interior of Our Lady of Ransom, a woman does the Stations laboriously on her knees, after prostrating herself before the Disneycoloured altar with her arms outstretched to their fingertips.

  Few come here without cleansing themselves ritually from the ghats below the seafront. A squad of noisy youths stripped to their Y-fronts splash water at three shrill girls dressed in the shalwar kameez of North India. A young South Indian with his head shaven, apart from a small pigtail at the back, picks his way carefully across some rocks beyond the ghats until he comes to a lonely pool, where he bathes in solitude, before rearranging his lunghi round his hips. A trio of well-fleshed men descend the bathing steps and jump in boisterously, one of them a Brahmin with the confirming thread of the twice-born slung over his right shoulder and under his left arm. A fourth man stands on the edge of the water nervously, while the others dare him to take the plunge. Eventually and tentatively he does, with a weakly inane grin: whereupon the Brahmin, most pot-bellied and loudest of the others, wades heavily towards him, seizes his hand and leads him to the deeper part, as gently as if the fellow were his infant son.

  When the pilgrims have completed their rituals of hygiene and prayer, they saunter along the promenade running above the ghats and below the most
substantial hotels. They do not investigate the adjacent fishing village because that would involve intrusion into caste, which would certainly occasion astonishment and might even result in catastrophe. The ones who have planned their visit after consulting the lunar calendar can savour a unique spectacle, moments before twilight begins: the pale disc of a full moon rising from the waters as the molten sphere of the sun lowers itself into the self-same sea. These reverent people regard this as another form of holiness. So did Mahatma Gandhi, who also came here to meditate, and whose memorial on the seafront strangely echoes pre-war British cinema buildings, a 1936-ish Odeon, perhaps. With the exception of its fishing village, there is something about Kanya Kumari as a whole, especially along its promenade that conveys a whiff of Herne Bay, or some other English watering place that has known distinctly better days.

  But this is where India begins; and she is inimitable. The land rises very shallowly from the sea, its sandy scrub soon giving way to palms and other trees, and plots of irrigated land which villagers till. Presently the first high ground rears above the coastal plain, a ridge of barren rock running northwards in a series of swerving pinnacles, all flaring with heat so intense that they are effectively unclimbable. The scenery is being assembled for topographical drama. Barren rock is soon clad with vegetation and the Western Ghats barricade the occidental seaboard against the rest of the country, shielding lush Kerala from the harsh and bony landscape further inland. Eventually the Ghats subside into the deserts of Rajasthan, which themselves give way to the mighty rivers of the North, that in one season will confer life on millions, and in another cause disaster and death on a frightful scale. When the rains come and the rivers swell there is nothing on earth like the sight of them, running torrentially, a mile or more wide, sweeping everything out of their path. Yet the greatest drama the eye can see is saved for the last and lies well above the Gangetic plain. Foothills rise from the rasping dust of early summer, and shimmer in a palpitating haze, which suddenly lifts when these tops, forested with rhododendron and deodar, have climbed to the point at which snow is a real possibility rather than a lowland fantasy; to reveal the mot sensational range of mountains in the world, white and gleaming and utterly impregnable, as improbably as any theatrical backcloth in their operatic grandeur. They fill the horizon and half the heavens when first seen from any of those foothills in upper Garhwal. If there is such a thing as a terrestrial abode of the gods, then it will surely be there.

  Stand with your back to the sea at Kanya Kumari, which is two thousand miles from that stupendous barrier, and sense the weight, the full immensity, the huge variety of this subcontinent bearing down upon you. Beyond this scrubby littoral a tale unfolds such as no other land can tell in such measure as this. No other nation has ever known such a natural diversity of tongues, the result, for the most part, of slow evolution since the beginning of mankind. No other country has lived with so complicated a past so equably, assimilating everything that has happened to it, obliterating naught, so that not even the intricate histories of European states have produced such a rich pattern as that bequeathed by the Mauryas, the Ashokas, the Pahlavas, the Guptas, the Chalukyas, the Hoysalas, the Pandyas, the Cholas, the Mughals, and the British—to identify only a few of the peoples who have shaped India’s inheritance. Nor is there another land that constantly provokes in the stranger such elation and despair, so much affection and anger, by powerful contrasts and irreducible opposites of behaviour; wickedness and virtue, caring and indifference, things bewitching and disgusting and terrifying and disarming, often in quick succession. India has nuclear power and other advanced technology close by some of the most obscene slums in creation; she has never failed to hold democratic elections at the appointed time, yet those too frequently elevate men whose own votes can be bought with rupees and other emoluments; she has a high and mighty self-esteem and a taste for moral posturing which equals anything suffered by her people when the British were here; she has been capable of unparalleled generosity to her last imperial rulers, but she bickers endlessly and meanly with her closest neighbour and twin; she gave birth to the creed of massive nonviolent protest and once practised this effectively, yet in the first generation of independence she has assassinated three of her own leaders, starting with the begetter of satyagraha.… Such contradictions and anomalies as these run through India from end to end and help to make her incomparable.

  As does another characteristic. Religion, too, flourishes here as it does nowhere else. Other lands may surrender themselves totally to a particular faith, but in India most creeds are deeply rooted and acknowledged fervently. Virtually the whole population practices some form of devotion: the Indian without the slightest feeling for the divine, without a spiritual dimension to his life, is exceedingly rare. By this means the wretched can entertain the possibility of improvement, and are sustained in their wretchedness until something better comes their way in another form, or until they are even more blessedly released from the cycle of life and death. The comfortable find in it a justification of their prosperity and an assurance that their submission will continue to bring them rewards. The most truly spiritual merely hope that with perseverance they will one day achieve enlightenment.

  Incomparable and inimitable she is; but in this as in much else, India is also our great paradigm.

  For a quarter of a century, the great subcontinent had captivated me. I first came to it out of simple curiosity and was almost overwhelmed by that introduction, in which everything was so much more powerful and intense than I had been led to expect. For a moment I was tempted to retreat from it to some bland place where all the senses were not so relentlessly assailed, to some less harrowing society where one’s spirits were not so regularly lowered by human misery, to a more restful haven in which it was not so necessary to be forever on guard against persistent and unwanted attention. Plenty of Westerners do not survive their initial experience of the subcontinent, fleeing in anxiety, in disgust, and with indignation from its darkness, condemned never to know it properly. But many more are vouchsafed in that first encounter a glimpse of something so enchanting, so inspiring, so utterly and attractively outside all previous experience, that they know they will return as often as possible, to be thrilled by it afresh.

  I was one of these fortunates, and I had many times revisited the subcontinent in order to increase my understanding of it, once in a journey across Pakistan, otherwise repeatedly in India. In the beginning I had chiefly been interested in the local history which, through the coincidence of my English birth, was part of my history, too; to that extent I was trying to find something of myself in this strangely compelling land, even though I was the first member of my family ever to set foot in Asia. But gradually I became more fascinated by the texture of society here, by its very complexity, and especially by the way it had been formed from and was still dominated by religious attitudes, notwithstanding its secular democracy. My earliest visits to India had been confined to the North, which is where most of the great historical events associated with the British took place. When eventually I went south, I discovered a region that was never less than subtly different, and was sometimes obdurately so. It had not been shaped as much as the North had once been by a mighty zeal for Islam, but continental Europeans had left a greater impression here than elsewhere, especially the Portuguese and the French. It was possible to envisage the South as Hinduism’s centre of gravity, and I had concluded that this was the reason why a high proportion of the foreigners wandering the southern states were not merely sampling an alien culture, but were more intently looking for spiritual nourishment. This, it seemed to me, distinguished them from almost all the outsiders criss-crossing other parts of India, except those who took themselves to Ladakh and similar anchorholds in the more mountainous recesses of the far North.

  In a way, I had become one of them. And here I was again, on a further stage of my own Indian pilgrimage, hoping to understand something more of the great subcontinent. Also, trying to
find another part of myself.

  Geoffrey Moorhouse also contributed “Encounter with a Rajah” to Part III. Both stories were excerpted from his book OM: An Indian Pilgrimage.

  Recommended Reading

  We hope Travelers’ Tales India has inspired you to read on. A good place to start is the books from which we’ve made selections, and we have listed them below.

  Aitkin, Bill. Divining the Deccan: A Motorbike to the Heart of India. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

  Allen, Charles. Plain Tales from the Raj. New York: Henry Holt, 1985.

  Allen, Charles. The Search for the Buddha:The Men Who Discovered India’s Lost Religion. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003.

  Alter, Stephen: Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture. Harcourt, 2001.

  Arnett, Robert. India Unveiled. New York: Atman Press, 2002.

  Blank, Jonah. Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana through India. New York: Grove Press, 2000.

  Bloch, Bijleveld. Seduced by the Beauty of the World:Travels in India. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003.

  Brata, Sasthi. India: Labyrinths in the Lotus Land. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1985.

  Chaudhuri, Nirad C. The Continent of Circe: An Essay on the Peoples of India. New York: Jaico Publishing House, 1999.

  Coll, Steve. On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia. New York: Random House, Inc., 1994.