A South Indian Journey

by Michael Wood

  Mala disappeared into the kitchen while her father spoke to me. He had been born in 1907 and raised under the British (he was already forty when they left). Like his wife’s father he had been headman of the town council at Chidambaram, so he spoke enough English to get by. His caste had done well under the British, but not so well in the Dravidian movement since Independence, which had been against religion, caste and the Brahminical order. There had been a massive redistribution of land, wealth and job opportunities in Tamil Nadu under DMK governments from the late sixties onwards, after Congress was booted out. Even more so since the eighties, when swingeing positive discrimination in favour of the lower castes had changed the whole social makeup of the state. It had been about time, most felt. But small Vellala landowners, still farming a few acres, committed to the ancient traditions, were stripped of any influence, and were now very much representatives of an older world.

  Mala’s father was such a man. In the old days they had farmed 120 acres of paddy and betel nuts with a few tamarind trees near Killai, on the road to the sea. ‘That was in the days when there was no money,’ her father explained. ‘Only paddy. The workers who built the house worked only for paddy, and so did the field labourers.’ Now Mala’s brother, the active head of family, who lived here with his wife and daughter, farmed only the twenty-five acres which remained.

  The father spoke slowly, deliberately, partly because of his age, but also because he was clearly someone who had been good at weighing up situations and people; he was a man who knew the value of things. ‘Our community are the traditional farmers of Tamil country. Our name Vellala comes from vellanmai in Tamil speech. Vellan means ‘water’; anmai means ‘managing’: we were people who managed the water here in Chola Nadu, which means the Cavery delta. And in rice country, the main job is water managing.’

  Mala popped her head round the door: ‘Our other name is Karkotta Vellalas: people who wait for the rain, save the rain; gathering it in tanks and saving it for irrigation.’

  He nodded. ‘Everything here depends on irrigating, bringing water,’ he continued; ‘this was the job of our community, for every community has its job. But we are the ancient people of the soil; full bred, not migrating.’

  Mala’s sister came out of the kitchen with tea and rice puffs. Above their father’s head, running round the walls of the livingroom, was a narrow shelf with pictures of the family: at their moments of rites of passage, the special pujas, celebrations, birthdays, marriages, lamented children. There was father’s eightieth birthday celebration at Tirukkadiyur, the great shrine of Yama, the God of Death and ‘Keeper of Dharma’. There was their mother’s father too, wearing the black coat and hat of a clerk. And there was Mala’s wedding photo from 1959. Mani was twenty-four, she was eighteen. Solemn faced. Unsmiling. They looked more well-to-do then. Now she had the marks of life on her.

  ‘There are many stories about our origin,’ he went on. ‘They say that thousands of years ago, when the people knew nothing of cultivation and irrigation, drought fell on the world. People prayed to the goddess Earth to help; out of her own body she made a man carrying a plough who knew the secrets of agriculture, of how to till the soil. His offspring are the Vellala. Children of the goddess,’ he said, with a little smile as if to anticipate my scepticism.

  *

  Mala’s sister-in-law brought banana leaves, which she placed on the floor. Then in the light of oil-lamps we ate rice and sambhar the men first, as is the custom, the women only later. Around us the wooden pillars and painted architraves, the photos, the pictures of the family gods, conveyed a sense of rootedness in traditional time. Mala’s father’s generation were almost gone now, and Tamil Nadu would not see his like again. They were, one imagined, not so far from the people recorded in the Cholan inscriptions of a thousand years ago on the temple walls, the free peasantry who supported the high culture of the Cholan kingdom in alliance with kings and Brahmins. It was an order which had sustained the south for two thousand years. But it depended on an unfree or semi-free peasantry working below it, and that could not survive India’s revolution into democracy.

  ‘We are Vaisya caste,’ the father continued. ‘In the time of the British, the Britishers tried to write down every caste, to fix things which cannot be fixed. In the time of my grandfather they made a census and wrote us down as Sudras’ (the lowest caste above the untouchables: the labouring and servile caste). ‘But this was mistake; we say we are Vaisyas. The ancient law book, the book of Manu, says Vaisyas are permitted to keep cattle, cultivate the land, give wealth, to sacrifice, read scriptures, and to buy and sell; this is our right and our tradition. It greatly upset my grandfather. We say we are the old community of the land from even before the Brahmins were here. We were never servants of the higher-quality people and cannot be Sudra.’

  The British came to agree, and to value the Vellala’s work ethic and moral sensibility in much the same way that they valued the well-to-do, church-going, industrial working class in their own part of the empire. (Funnily enough, I know a Vellala doctor from Chidambaram who was a GP in Blackburn for twenty-five years and found himself very much at home in the traditional Lancashire working-class ethos.) A later census described the Vellala as ‘peace-loving, frugal and industrious; in the cultivation of rice, betel, tobacco they have perhaps no equal in the world… and will not condescended to work of a degrading nature’. The British also noticed that in religion they were more strict than the Brahmins: ‘abstaining from intoxicating liquor or meat’. This is still true and is rigorously maintained by Mala’s children, even when surrounded by the temptations of Madras.

  These were the values passed down by their grandfather. ‘We spent more time in his house than in our own when I grew up,’ said Bharati. ‘He told us, be honest, don’t cheat people, work hard, stand on your own two feet, and you will do fine, earn enough to make a good enough living. Didn’t you, Grandad?’ Grandad nodded, amused.

  ‘As for marriage, Grandad said if you have a good heart then you will find someone with a good heart.’

  Mala said his advice to her was more blunt: ‘Pray to Nataraja but make sure your money’s safe in the bank.’ At this he laughed and shook his head ruefully.

  Later Bharati took me round the house and showed me some of its secrets. At the little staircase where you enter from the street, she explained, every morning before sunrise, grandmother brushes the ground and splashes the clean dust with fresh cow dung and water. Then she marks out the kolam of rice flour before the threshold.

  ‘This is not only for auspiciousness,’ said Bharati, ‘but as a first sacrifice of the day, to show mercy and kindness even to the most inferior creatures.’

  ‘What do you mean inferior creatures?’

  ‘Insects.’

  ‘Insects?’

  ‘Yes: this is why it must be rice flour, so that they may eat it.’

  Inside the latticed entrance porch is a kind of upper lobby, the thinnai, which has a raised platform for sitting or sleeping.

  ‘Here grandfather would receive visitors and watch the world go by, or house pilgrims who needed shelter or rest: that is, strangers who would be given hospitality but not be invited to share the family hearth,’ Bharati went on. ‘Here in the thinnai at five every evening the family lights the traditional lamp for Lakshmi which will burn through the night.’

  Then you go through the door into the living-room, where her grandfather and I had talked and eaten. This has a large square light well in the middle, which is surrounded by a row of old wooden columns. This space gives light and fresh air but here also the family pray to the sun and eat their rice milk and jaggery at Pongal, the annual harvest festival. The living space is divided by a curtain, there are two small rooms off it and a roof space above for the family treasures, bronzes, vessels and marriage gifts, including beautiful and ornate gold wedding necklaces.

  The main part of the living-room has a bench along the wall. In the shadows are a TV and fridge. Here the fami
ly entertain guests and set the table – ‘lay the banana leaf’, as they say in Tamil.

  The kitchen was at the back of the house; There was a little altar on a shelf with pictures of Murugan, Lakshmi, Venkateshwara, and three small statues of Vinayaka covered with flowers. Though the family deity is Nataraja, like all Tamils they have a special affection for the elephant-headed Ganesh, and on the family land they built and maintain a little temple to him. Here in the kitchen they do their morning puja and at dusk when they light the lamp in the front porch, they close the back gate and burn one here too.

  Behind the house was a brick yard with a well and a latrine: by the kitchen wall were stone grinding bowls, one for iddly and one for chillies. To the left a little herb and flower garden with flowers for puja (red hibiscus and nadiya vatai, a delicate white flower) and an orange-flowering bush which is twined in women’s hair as a decoration. In the middle is a clump of basil in a little stone pot; this medicinal plant is traditionally kept in every house (as it still is in rural Greece too). ‘We call it the flower of Vishnu,’ said Bharati. ‘We boil up the root for fevers; the juice of the leaves is very good for children if they have a cold and also as medicine; we mix it with lime juice for skin infections.’

  To the right through a gate were the remains of an old garden, with an ancient brick-lined well; further on under an arch was a brick and earth yard with a covered colonnade and a threshing platform. Here were the family’s two cows and a calf, which provide them with ghee and milk.

  Last of all, in between the yard and the house, there was a narrow storage room about six feet wide and twenty-five feet long. We pushed open the door and went inside. By the door were big sealed jars of this year’s tamarind, red chilli, green dhal and paddy seed. There was a huge wooden tallboy for rice, taller than me, sealed at the top, accessible at the bottom through little trapdoors. Beyond it we climbed over a jumble of disused implements: an old planter’s chair with swivel arms, its wicker bottom gone; discarded home-made wooden toys and a heap of children’s cots. It had the feeling of a kind of memory room for the family; Bharati was visibly moved. Mala joined us, laughing at my obsessive recording of all the details but touched all the same by the sight of these relics of her children’s childhood and her own.

  ‘Houses have a life,’ said Mala later. ‘They are conceived like a person. When you make a house you have to have an astrologer to give a horoscope, to find the right time, the right alignment, the right soil. You must pray to Mars so that the house is properly grounded and then to Vinayaka; these influence the length of its life, and the life of the people who live in it. Correct performance of rituals helps all this. There is a puja for the laying of the foundation post. When my father’s grandfather built this house, below the threshold he laid nine precious stones, for the nine planets: emerald, ruby, diamond and so on, to give the house wealth and long life. Then they did pujas when the work was finished, all prescribed and supervised by a priest.

  ‘If you are buying a house which someone else built, you get a horoscope if you can, and also if you are building a new one. When you see a building site with a scarecrow this is not to scare off birds but to keep away bad spirits while it is being built. There was a house built close to Nataraja Talkies where attention was not paid to these things; it was left empty and the family went away. They could never sell it, and it was never rented out; a pawnbroker took the ground floor for his daytime business.

  ‘You see a house has a personality like a person. Like a marriage, people and house must have compatible horoscopes so that they get on well. When you build a house you ask a Brahmin to name, the auspicious time to start. Houses can be “heartly”, houses can be lonely; auspicious and inauspicious. Certain houses have no companionship. This is an auspicious house, and will stay so, whatever ups and downs happen in the family. We have guarded its personality carefully, so it will stand like a rock.’

  ‘There is a saying that with some houses, even if Yama the God of Death came to stay, no harm would befall its people. The life of a family can take on this strength. Well, this house is like that; I hope it may live two hundred years or more,’ said Bharati.

  Grandmother joined us from the kitchen: ‘No, this was never a lonely house,’ she said with an infectious laugh, which showed a still-splendid set of teeth. She slapped the thickness of the wall as if it were the rump of her favourite cow. ‘Look how thick the walls are; they don’t build houses like this any more. That’s why we have not changed it. It’s an auspicious house, so why change anything?’

  Afterwards, at Mala’s insistence, we walked in the darkness to Ananteeswaram, an ancient shrine at the end of a long sandy lane behind Bazaar Street. There were children sitting in the nave doing their homework and a gnarled old Brahmin shuffled over to unlock the inner gate. Mala explained she wished to do a puja for the health of my little daughters. Afterwards she was pensive.

  We sat in the forecourt and Bharati told me a story about Mala and Ananteeswaram.

  ‘When my mother was a little girl, two years old, she was very ill; it was thought she was about to die. She was then the only child. Close to my grandfather’s house in Chidambaram there is a temple, quite a large temple. It is called Ananteeswaram: Ananta is the serpent. My grandfather in his distress prayed there to the god for my mother’s life. He made a vow that if she lived he would make a special puja there every month. Also, that a portion of the income of his lands would be dedicated to Nataraja. He kept this promise. The offering is still made every month. My mother was very close to her father. She was his favourite. But he changed after she married. “How can I live without you?” he said. Now of course my uncle and his wife live with him in the family house. My grandfather has not been helpful financially even though he has seen the situation we are in. Half of his house is separate, and this is rented out to a merchant. When my mother and father were forced to come back to live here when my father went blind, my grandfather offered them to live in his house, but only at rent. Which they could not afford. But in any case they would have refused.’

  I said I didn’t understand why they couldn’t live in the grandfather’s house. And why had Mala refused?’

  ‘Even to rent would be wrong. It is alright for a son to do this, to live in the father’s house. But not for a girl. Once the girl has married, and her father has paid dowry to her husband’s family, she has left. That is that. It is the husband’s responsibility. It is my uncle who will inherit the house. The responsibility now is the husband’s family.’

  ‘So why can’t they help?’

  ‘My father’s family have lands in their village and in Sirkali on the way to Vaithisvarancoil. They have a big house with a tiled roof and a very lovely garden, with some old mango trees. But my father’s brother and his wife have cheated him out of his own share. This is the story.

  ‘The house was an old-fashioned house with a tiled roof, like our grandfather’s. It had a beautiful garden with many flowers and trees, and twenty mango trees, which in season gave abundant fruit of delightful sweetness. After my father married, he left his father’s house and moved with my mother to Pondi, where his work took him. His brother, however, continued to live in the house, and when he married, he stayed in it. The understanding was that they would share it. But when my father lost his sight, his brother got him to sign papers which left him in sole possession. My father was always trusting and did not have a head for business. He did not think his own brother would try to cheat him.

  ‘When my father went blind and lost his job, he came back to Chidambaram, and asked his brother whether we could also come to live in his family house in Sirkali. His wife, my father’s sister-in-law, said she did not want us there. Even the profit made each year on the sale of the fruit of the mango trees they did not share. All that is left is a separate plot of land on the outskirts of Sirkali on the road to Mayavaram; this is still held jointly and my father will get half when it is finally sold. We feel that my father’s brother must have p
lanned to cheat him of his rightful inheritance from long before. Certainly his wife planned it. At one point they even asked my father to pay the overdue tax on the plot of land when they did not have the money and the land was threatened with confiscation. He is so generous that he did.

  ‘When they refused to let us come to live in the house, my mother went to see them and she had a stand-up fight with her sister-in-law; in the end she was screaming at her. Now we don’t speak to that side of the family at all. All we want now is that they sell the plot of land, father gets the money which he is owed, and that my parents can move from where they are now to somewhere better. We really want mother and father to come to Madras. But I do not think mother will ever leave Nataraja.’

  5

  The Video Bus

  Just before nine on Friday evening we went down to the corner of East Car Street. Close by there is an old pillared mandapa in a sandy lane lined with tiled houses. This is Mala’s neighbourhood shrine to Ganesh, whom the Tamils call Vinayaka, the jolly elephant-headed god who blesses the start of all enterprises. There are said to be exactly 108 Ganeshes around the temple at Chidambaram – Mala probably knows where they all are too – but this is the one she and her neighbours choose for their prayers before they go on any journey. The bus was parked by the shrine, its bonnet decked with a chain of marigolds, a sign ‘Airbus 630’ stuck inside the window. The driver was fussing over a few lastminute checks. On the dashboard was a little plastic Murugan hung with fresh jasmine, smoke curling up from a fistful of incense sticks. Next to it was a silvered bust of Balaji framed by birds and flowers, and Siva’s silver trident studded with fake red jewels. By the cigarette lighter hung Our Lady of Velankanni, and on the wheel a little sandalwood Ganesh. And if that were not enough, there was a notice prominently painted on the side of the bus: ‘Insured by Overseas Insurance Company Cuddalore’. We were in safe hands.