A South Indian Journey

by Michael Wood

  *

  As we headed back to the bus, the wind swept the last of the clouds over the hills to the north. It was now a lovely day with a warm sun and a daffodil sky. Shining green paddies, rich glistening groves of coco palms, banana and bamboo; the rain had made everything come alive. Soon we headed off towards Nagercoil. To the right we passed the isolated mountain which marks the very end of the long chain of the Western Ghats, the spine of India. The dramatic pyramidal hill rises sheer out of the flat coastal plain, broken off from the main range which stretches off into the distance beyond. (It must be the one depicted by the English artists the Daniell brothers in the 1780s in one of their most memorable compositions.) This mysterious green mountain is called Maruda Malai – ‘Medicine Mountain’ – the place where healing plants grow. There is a legend about it, as there appears to be for almost every place in the south. This is the tale told me by Mr Subrahmaniam, a very sweet gentleman, who was travelling two seats behind me on the bus with his wife and teenage son. He was a tax inspector for one of the divisions of Chidambaram district.

  ‘During the tale of the Ramayana, when Rama had crossed into Lanka by the magical bridge built with the aid of Hanuman and the monkey king, Rama’s youngest brother Lakshman was hit by an arrow dipped in deadly snake poison, which was fired by a son of the demon king Ravana. Lakshman lay unconscious and near to death. Rama was plunged into great anxiety, and asked Hanuman the monkey god, his faithful companion, to hasten to Mount Kailash in the Himalaya to bring back the medicinal herb called sanjeevini, which alone is the antidote to all the world’s poisons. Hanuman did so, but when he got there, he saw the mountain was covered with herbs and flowers, and he was at a loss to know which was the right one. So he uprooted the whole hill, which was called medicine hill, and brought it down to Rama. But as he flew across to Sri Lanka, a piece of the mountain fell here, near Cape Comorin, and this is the hill today called Maruda Malai.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Of course these are ancient stories in which the common people take delight. We need not take them literally; the point is that they are beautiful tales, and give entertainment. But they are part of the religion of the ordinary folk, and you will find a love of these stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in every corner of India. Lately, of course, they have been very popular on TV, even among our Muslim and Christian neighbours.’

  He looked out of the window.

  ‘But it is a peculiarity of this place that in the rainy season, many kinds of medicinal herbs, which are used in the preparation of Ayurvedic remedies, grow wild on its slopes. They are a veritable pharmacopoeia of the traditional healing. The local people even cook the leaves of certain trees here, and the bitter grass which grows on the hill. It is said that after the battle with Ravana, and the conquest of Lanka, Hanuman installed a Siva linga on the mountain, as a thanksgiving for sorting out his medical emergency. And to this day, this linga is there on top, and visited and worshipped by pilgrims, particularly by those holy men and women who come down to Cape Comorin on foot in fulfilment of vows. It is one of the rituals they accomplish after bathing at the Cape, to bring their journey to a satisfying end.’

  SUCHINDRAM

  Suchindram. A big temple with an ornate tower standing by a pretty tank which reflected the old, red-tiled houses and the now cloudless blue sky. A notice outside in three languages stresses that the temple is open to all castes. Technically untouchables were allowed in all temples down here after Independence, but in practice this is still by no means everywhere the case. To enter, men must strip off and wear only a dhoti round the waist. I did so, and stood there by the bus trying to look inconspicuous, a foot higher than all my companions, my skin ghastly pale next to the luminous ebony of Raja and Ganesh. Mala and her friends laughed, as did the crowd at the pilgrim stalls. I was grateful to escape from the unsparing sunlight of the street into the shadows of the interior.

  The temple is chiefly remarkable for its extraordinary sequence of epigraphical records, and for its very rich – some would say over-rich – stone carving. The chap from the local government was in his element, eyes glowing with justifiable pride.

  ‘It is a treasure house of art and sculpture,’ he enthused. ‘Where else in the world would you see such things?’

  He insisted I try out the four famous musical pillars. Each is cut out of a single block of granite into clusters of cylindrical rods which emit musical notes when struck by a wooden stave.

  ‘There. This is the harp sound. And this the drum. You see, a symphony in praise of the Lord.’

  I confessed that I could hear no difference. Perhaps I simply lacked the ear of faith? He wagged his head reprovingly. ‘The point is, the Western ear is not trained as ours to detecting halftones and quarter-tones,’ he suggested, and clearing his throat, demonstrated with a scale from a Carnatic raga. My ear remained dull and blockish.

  One of the halls of the temple is carved entirely with incidents from the Ramayana; another has Hanuman, Siva as mendicant and Krishna with his flute, a vast anthology in stone of all-Indian mythology. For good measure there were Pali inscriptions of Ashoka with Tamil translations. These texts from the third century BC, the time of the great Mauryan empire, are our first documentary records of the traditional dynasties of the south, the Cholas, Pandyas and Pallavas, some of whose descendants, it is extraordinary to recall, were still ruling in these parts when the British East India Company landed its armies in the eighteenth century. Around the back was a little sunlit corner: a gnarled old pipal tree caught in a pool of sunlight, a cluster of ancient stone lingas and snake stones entwined in its roots; it was strewn with blossoms and smeared with fresh sandalwood and vermilion, incense smoke curling across a beam of light.

  We were about to leave when the local ice-cream man cycled furiously up to the bus on a three-wheeler with a wooden ice-box crammed with home-made lollies (the box lovingly hand-painted with flowers and lettered: ‘Jothi ices, home-made of best ingredients’). Then we set off for Courtallam.

  We left Tinnevelly behind, passing through little country towns and a landscape full of old buildings, temples and tanks out in the paddy-fields, their brickwork overgrown and crumbling; granite slabs lay displaced as nature took them back. The new is far less evident than the decay of the old. How strong here is this sense of dissolution and change as some key to life, as things decay back into their constituent elements, the elements celebrated in the temples. And even the greatest temples are impermanent, as impermanent in the eyes of Siva as the kolams of rice flour on the doorstep, blown away or rubbed into the dust at the threshold even before the sun reaches its height.

  Travelling in this countryside gave a sense of why the Hindu religion is the way it is. Fecundity and barrenness; plenty and scarcity; violence and balm, a climate which alternates between benign calm and enervating extremes of heat; the irresistible violence of cyclone, monsoon or flood, when the ancient banyans along the roads are thrown on to their heads like clods of soil. Even the buildings, the ornate, pillared halls, the gopuras sprouting like petrified vegetation, seem to grow out of the palm forests like weird hybrids, part plant, part stone.

  Not surprising then, given all this, that the myths of Tamil culture are given to the most intense extremes of expression, from the Cholan bronzes to today’s Tamil movies with their make-believe violence and their barely suppressed sexuality. Even more than the rest of India, perhaps, Tamil culture is preoccupied with the attractions of excess, and the correspondingly extreme idea of restraint and control – and an awareness of the dynamic tension and conflict which inevitably comes out of their coexistence.

  COURTALLAM

  The day had grown very hot indeed by the time we reached Ambasamudram. No restaurant here could seat so many people, so they improvised, laying sixty banana leaves down in an upstairs corridor, where we all sat cross-legged like a line of beggars outside a temple choultry. Then the boy came down ladling food out of his buckets: vegetable sambhar, rice, curd,
black-eyed beans, okra, a kind of celery in egg and lemon sauce, orange chutney, tamarind pickle: all beautifully prepared, and for seven rupees each.

  Through the afternoon we pressed on down a winding country road, the wooded flanks of the Western Ghats getting nearer and nearer on our left-hand side. Gardens of nutmeg, clove, cinnamon and coffee; the velvet sheen of tea plantations in the lowering sun. Then we turned off into a bowl of hills cut by deep valleys. At 3.30 we reached Courtallam and stopped in the bus park behind the old Siva temple. Around us unfolded a beautiful landscape, which was often painted and engraved by artists during the British period when people came up here to take the waters and escape the heat. An Arcadian place, it was often said; it would take a Claude Lorraine to do justice to its ancient spirit.

  Mala’s husband used to come here when he was a boy, before he lost his sight, and it is one of his imperishable memories from the days when he could still see; how in July as the heat lessens after the first rains have fallen along the wooded mountains bordering Kerala, the waters rise above Courtallam, the river swells and the falls become full. Then, he said, on July mornings ‘the spray hangs in the air in tiny droplets like a kind of mist, catching the rays of sunlight, casting a myriad rainbows around the sides of the falls’. To him, it was a vision of glory.

  A new hydroelectric plant has been built now higher upstream so the flow of water is not what it was. But when the monsoon falls on Kerala in June, the Chittar river still swells and reaches full flow in July. It still has a good head in October, crashing two hundred feet, cascading over a sheer precipice which is broken about halfway down by a deep trough in the face of the rock. In the old days it was a wild place: cliffs hung with trees, ferns and creepers, pock-marked with caves, rock-cut terraces and carvings, where many sadhus, men and women, had taken up residence. (There are still a few.) Below the falls the temples, mandapas and hostels were set back on the left bank of the stream in a very picturesque setting, drawn in the eighteenth century by the English artists, the Daniells, who did so much to fix the picturesque view of India in European art. Inevitably, with the huge growth of pilgrimage, the place has been taken over by modern concrete buildings plastered with advertising hoardings, and the river has an ugly new bridge draped with electric power lines. The place is still wonderful, but its divinity has been hedged by the modern world.

  Dodging hawkers, we crossed the bridge, and I sat with Mala’s bags and clothes as she went for a dip. There are three main sections to the falls here: the women’s falls are at the left; the right-hand fall is mainly used by children and older people; in the middle there is a very powerful current and a concrete safety rail. Here the young men swagger and josh each other, having a laugh and a bit of horseplay. Some balance on isolated rocks as if daring the current to knock them off into the river below. Soon Mala came back dripping wet and went to change. When she returned I stripped off to a loincloth and headed for the young men’s section to whistles from the crowd – again I was the only foreigner here. They held out their hands and pulled me in. The force of the central flow was just about bearable; after a dawn start and six hours in a hot bus, it was deliriously cool and good to taste: the water pressing on my head, pummelling my face and rushing into my mouth.

  ‘What conduces much to the restoration of invalids at this singular abode,’ wrote the author of the British Medical Report in 1832,

  is the little waterfall, under which most of the Europeans daily bathe. The falling of the water, after the first shock is over, gives an indescribable feeling of pleasure; by its constant beating, it quickens the circulation and produces a fine glow all over the body; and has, besides, the further good effects of dispelling languor, raising the spirits, exciting appetite, and promoting digestion in a superior degree to any other kind of bathing that we are acquainted with. It has, in consequence of these virtues, together with the delightful climate of the valley itself, been the happy means of rapidly restoring many to health and comfort who previous to their visit to Cortallam appeared to be hastening to their graves.

  Feeling suitably rejuvenated I went back to Mala, who immediately shooed me back into the water: ‘It’s not enough – this is too short a stay. You must stand for a minimum of ten minutes to get full benefits.’ So back I went. Then we all decamped from the main falls to the Five Falls, a tree-shrouded fairy grotto where five streams pour down crevices in the black rock. There we went through the same ritual again as the sun sank behind the hills and the skin tingled with cold. I was photographed with half-naked priests (Raja and Ganesh), the beaming tax inspector, the manager of a worsted mill from Coimbatore and the back four of a football team from Tinnevelly who somehow got in on the picture. Eyes twinkling, Mr Ramasamy barked out one more of his aruvai joks as I snapped him, while the now chilly water dripped off the end of his beaky nose. Mala then took the camera to take some pictures of her neighbours. The tax inspector shepherded us all into line; everyone by now seemed excited and there was a great feeling of togetherness. Soaked to the skin, little Minakshi’s face was lit up, her huge eyes wide, as she held her aunt’s hand for their photo. Her aunt allowed herself the faintest of smiles as she balanced on a glistening mossy rock in a clinging marigold sari, still managing to exude auspicious female power even when she looked as if she’d been pulled through a mangle.

  The tax inspector came over in a voluminous pair of underpants and gave me a fatherly smile. ‘So now you are getting into it. Now I am sure you will begin to feel the benefit of our Indian holy places.’ I was. I can remember other memorable dips in Indian sacred waters: at the freezing confluence of the Ganga and the Jumna; in crashing breakers at Puri; in the Ganga in Benares in the late summer when the river is high and has the temperature and thickness’ of strong brown tea; but the falls at Courtallam surpassed them all; they were exactly as Rajdurai had promised. Perhaps the tax inspector was right: I was beginning to feel that I might after all garner a little spiritual merit from this journey.

  Early in the evening we drove into Tenkasi. Set back from the road was a gigantic gopura, pale in the half light. Inside were wonderfully sculpted halls depicting scenes from the Mahabarata. The local tax inspector was now warming to the whole thing. ‘These stories we imbibe with our mothers’ milk,’ he said, describing the ‘Exile in the Forest’; then came a hall with Siva’s dance portrayed, the fierce and smiling dance on adjacent pillars and the constantly recurring myth of Siva’s dance competition with the black goddess Kali. ‘See how they have been carved, such huge figures, with such delicacy. Here the artist’s hand found speech.’

  After puja we sat together in the arcade.

  ‘These holy places we call tirthas. In Sanskrit this means crossing place of a river. In ancient times many sacred places were on holy rivers. But also tirtha means crossing place between human world and divine. God appeared on earth in these places. So they are especially suited to approach the deity now. They are crossing places between different worlds. In your country?’

  ‘In my country, Mr Subrahmaniam, we have completely lost the sense of two worlds.’

  With that he turned to me with a worried look, hesitant, as if anxious not to offend.

  ‘Tell me one thing, Mr Michael. This has perplexed me during our journey. You are Christian. How do you reconcile this in your conscience with attending our rituals?’

  Outside, big drops of rain were falling again. Sound of rain pattering on leaves.

  ‘I cannot really call myself a Christian,’ I began. ‘I don’t go to church or anything like that. I suppose you might say I’m just curious.’

  ‘About the god?’

  ‘About Tamil culture, about being Tamil. Anyway, I thought Hindus think the truth of all religions is ultimately the same?’

  ‘Indeed, this is what Lord Krishna says to Arjuna in the Gita.’

  ‘I think that too. And still, as Mrs Mala says, I feel a great heartliness in being here.’

  ‘It is all that matters in the end. As the saints sa
y, the key is not in the temples or the idols or the holy baths, but in your own heart.’

  Outside, flashes of lightning suddenly illuminated the horizon of townscape, silhouetting the gopura black against the night. Tremendous thunder. We hurried across the enclosure as the drops of rain fell on our backs. We ran past a huge tree hung with prayers and requests. The rain started to pour. We left the town with the wipers on monsoon setting. How on earth could the driver see through it? There followed a death-defying journey to Srivilliputtur, driver and assistant craning forwards as water cascaded over the windscreen. On the narrow road, buses and lorries approached head on out of the night, swerving with inches to spare. I kept flinching. Raja just laughed. Above our heads, MGR danced on.

  SRIVILLIPUTTUR

  At nine o’clock we reached Srivilliputtur. A great Vaishnavite shrine with a gigantic gopura soaring nearly 250 feet in elegant curves, the entire structure swathed in bamboo scaffolding and rattan screens. Vast and truly impressive. This is a temple to Vishnu but is celebrated all over the south because of the legend of the mystic poetess, Andal, who lived here in the ninth century. Here we stopped for our evening meal.

  It is a huge campus. We had missed the last puja so people went off to do a bit of sightseeing as the priests locked up the sanctum, and we all bought bags of goa, the milk sweet for which the town is famous. The big nave was packed with Vaishnavite pilgrim pictures and souvenirs, including cassettes and books of Andal’s songs; but supposing myself to be temperamentally more of a Saivite, I gave them a miss.

  Outside the nave was a wide sandy approach with gardens over to one side. My dhoti was in tatters after the frolicking at Courtallam, so I went out into the street to buy a new one at a textile stall run by an old Muslim gentleman in a white embroidered cap; Srivilliputtur’s Muslim weavers are one of the town’s mainstays. His cavernous shop had polished wooden shelves, and an open carpeted floor where rolls of cloth could be spread out. Behind his desk sticks of incense were burning by a row of holy pictures just as in any Hindu shop. Here, though, they showed Mecca and Medina; he had scenes of Indian Muslim saints performing supernatural feats of endurance, riding tigers and charming snakes just like Hindu holy men. He also had a poster which is popular throughout south India: it depicts Buraq the magical horse who transported the Prophet on his night journey and on his ascent to heaven – an elaborately bejewelled winged centaur with pink body and peacock-feather wings and, to cap it all, a beautiful woman’s face with made-up eyes and lipstick.