A South Indian Journey

by Michael Wood

  From Mayavaram the route turns westwards, inland along the old track of the Cavery: you glimpse the river through the window at the little halts. It is no wider than the Thames as it winds through the meadows of Windsor, and is overhung with a jungly tangle of palms and creepers. At every halt were dripping banyans and temple gopuras, with little station signs: ‘Alight here for worship at Uppiliankovil.’

  In the delta we entered a watery world: a flat land of dykes, canals, streams, rivers, rivulets. It is less than a hundred miles across but there are over thirty main rivers and numberless streams, drains, lodes, cuts and sluices. Across the paddy the snaking patterns of the field baulks formed a tracery of green across sheets of water which mirrored trees and clouds. Every acre of this landscape has been elaborately and intensively tended since ancient times. Easy here to imagine people like Mala’s father and his ancestors, the ‘keepers of the water’, who tilled it under the kings of olden days: a world without history or landmarks until it was shaped by the irrigators with their dams and anicuts.

  The British thought the landscape of the Cavery delta the most fertile of all their Indian territories: ‘It affords annually three luxuriant rice harvests,’ wrote Colonel Fullarton in his View of English Interests in India (1785), ‘the forests abound with valuable trees, the country is overstocked with sheep and cattle and teeming with an industrious race expert in agriculture. Such are the natural benefits it enjoys that no spot upon the globe is superior in productions for the use of man.’

  This landscape has been celebrated in Tamil poetry for 2000 years; there are hymns to the sacred Cavery in the Sangam poetry. But it is above all the landscape sung by the saints between AD 600 and 900. Their hymns form a kind of litany of the land, encapsulating the myths of a society and a civilization, myths about the primeval spirits of this alluvial world: folk deities of water, juice, rain, sperm and sap, gods of mango tree, Vili tree, jambu tree. Their shrines form the landmarks in a network of sacred journeys created by the ancient poets: an imaginal landscape which gave form to this fluid green wilderness.

  This enchanted land is the core of the Tamil sacred geography: it is perhaps the most intensively mythologized tract of India. More than half of the 274 Saivite sacred sites are to be found in this compact triangle of the delta, from the sea to its apex at Tiruvadi; Nowhere do you have to travel more than a day’s journey on foot to find a shrine sung in the Tevaram hymns. Pilgrims will find shelter and food for the night in an ancient network of choultries and adinams: hostels where, as it says in the religious guidebooks, ‘free meals are provided throughout the year… free accommodation for all classes… meals gratis to Brahmins… supplies given to Bairagis for three days’. And there will always be religious people like Mala or Mr Subrahmaniam who will shelter and feed the pilgrims before sending them on their way.

  The paths which link these shrines take you all the way from the Western Ghats to the sea, and from the north of the Coromandel down to Cape Comorin, a journey of over five hundred miles. They are paths still followed today, ‘from the shining Pennar river swelled with the monsoon clouds…’ to Tiruvidaimarudur ‘on the south bank of the cascading Cavery which throws up on its banks its precious cargo of sandalwood, aloe and wild mountain rice’. It was these invisible but still trodden tracks through the modern world of Tamil Nadu which marked out the last stage of my journey.

  The train reached Kumbakonam at seven in the evening and I found a room in a hostel overlooking the back of the Nageshwara temple: a tiny cell-like room with bare, blue-washed walls marked by unidentifiable stains. There were metal grills over the door, and a plastic jug and mug on a battered Formica table; clearly the hostel catered for a rougher sort of clientele. In the upstairs corridor were Indian-style loos and at the back a row of open shower cubicles where a balcony gave a sunset view over freshly painted gopuras. In the shower I talked to a jolly travelling salesman.

  ‘This is the town of maths and muths. This Sarangapani Street is the home of Ramanujan, the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century. He came to your Cambridge University at the behest of Professor Hardy of Trinity College, but he experienced sickness of heart due to leaving Tamil Nadu and died in London age only thirty-two. He was a man who knew infinity. Mathematics is a great Hindu science; the numerical system which is today used by the world, with absolute zero and decimal point, is a Hindu invention. All the wonders of modern science would be impossible without it.’

  He laughed. ‘We have 33 million gods: so you can see we have to be good at maths! Ramanujan was all his life a Hindu: a child of the sacred Cavery. He said this: an equation has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.’

  Dawn came with clear air, damp streets and temple bells. The river, which was high, runs right through the busy town. There are many temples. At Nageshwara the sculpture is exquisite, the unpainted stone weathered to the softest finish. In the niches around the shrine is a series of languidly graceful female figures, probably queens and princesses of King Aditya’s household, and masterpieces on a par with anything you will see in India. (They are dated 886, the time when Alfred the Great was struggling with the Danes.) Other subjects are mythical: a melting Ardanari, half-man, half-woman; Siva as the enchanting mendicant, attenuated limbs, breathtakingly delicate. These figures bring to mind the finest Gothic, the equivalent perhaps of the Portail Royal at Chartres. Though bronze casting shows little diminution of quality over the entire Chola period, stone sculpture in Tamil Nadu had gone decidedly off by the time you reach Rajaraja at Tanjore. (Gigantism? Imperialism?) It bucks up again at Gangakondasolapuram in the 1030s, but this early flowering is the very best, by common consent the greatest stone sculpture ever produced in the south.

  At lunchtime I went to change money at the State Bank of India. I am reluctant to use the word, but it was truly Dickensian. An open floor crammed with tables, teak bookcases, cabinets, fans whirling in the ceiling; it was populated by a hierarchy of cashiers, clerks, underclerks and apprentices. Across the floor the tea boy shimmied with a circular aluminium tray full of glasses which he grasped by a central holder like a puja tray, expertly negotiating the crowded floor and the incessant circulation of weighty cash books. In the centre of the clerks’ area was a large polished walnut revolving cabinet whose compartments carried sixty to a hundred big ledgers: ‘next year we will be computerizing’, says the clerk to whose desk I am ushered.

  In the meantime, half a dozen forms are to be filled in to change my travellers’ cheque; the clerk has Saivite marks on his forehead and behind him there are enough deities on the wall to make up a football team; the airbrushed faces of the goddesses are disturbingly like real photographs subtly idealized. No wonder they are so sure what gods look like.

  Then I went to the Mahamaham tank right in the middle of town, a huge stepped basin lined by a dozen pillared mandapas; incessant mantras are relayed through loudspeakers all around the tank. This was the scene earlier in the year of the Mahamaham festival which takes place only once every twelve years. Now there is a baked cloudy leaden sky, stovy somnolent heat building up for another storm; a few bathers in a scum of debris and litter, bits of leaves and vegetables. In the corner of the tank is a man washing his bum in the holy water. Incessant, tuneless, distorted drone of the loudspeakers.

  In the festival last February two or three million turned up on the key day, jamming every access into this already congested corner of town. Coincidentally or not, the day appointed by the astrologers was the birthday of Chief Minister Jayalalitha, MGR’s former co-star and protégée. For the occasion the tank was lined with enormous cut-outs of the ‘living legend’ sporting her distinctive poncho; there were stories that bathing at the most auspicious bathing time was delayed to allow her arrival by helicopter to have the maximum effect. When she landed a wall collapsed under pressure from the crowd and forty or fifty people were killed in the rush. There were murmurings about culpability, but the victims’ families swiftly received state payouts, and
the living legend’s reputation did not suffer. Like her mentor MGR, her cult is growing now. Her image is proliferating all over the state, even the state bus corporation has now been renamed the Hon. Dr Jayalalitha Bus Co. She gives no interviews (always politic, if it can be managed), is ever more unapproachable and autocratic, or so it is whispered. Her most zealous MPs and party workers practise full prostration in her presence, a tribute even Mrs Thatcher did not receive. Divinity surely beckons.

  A number of people were sitting on the steps of the tank, including a family from Tuticorin: husband, wife and teenage son. They were on pilgrimage to Tirupati via Kumbakonam where the wife’s father lived. He wore Western clothes, she a sari; the son was fed up and not at all interested. Dad was a scientist at a coastal research establishment, a specialist in heavy water. They offered to share their food so we sat by one of the mandapas on the steps and opened our tiffin boxes to eat rice and sambhar. Then up came another woman, a renouncer.

  She carried a small cloth bag of her life’s belongings. She was not very old; had an androgynous look under a dusty lion’s mane of hair. She sat and waited, didn’t force herself on us but did not ignore us; whenever I looked up she was looking into my eye. I felt conspicuously greedy dipping my hand into the tiffin box. Who was this young woman, wandering the streets of south India, blown by the hot wind around the scum-filmed tanks of the holy city of Kumbakonam, begging for alms? (Of course the point about renouncing is that it gives liberation not to be born again: ‘Grant me the boon not to be born.’)

  The wife, who has said nothing, goes over and puts food on to her plate. The woman eats.

  We got up to go. Abstracted, the woman muttered to herself, head on one side like a bird, as if she had been listening and had a question. She gets up and walks with us along the side of the tank; walks past and stops. She has nothing and no one by the look of it. Remember Appar: ‘We have nothing. We fear nothing. We are free.’

  In the evening I took a bike to Darasuram over the river; there were immense banks of blue cloud to the north-east. A few big drops of rain and then it lets loose, torrential rain lashing the road. Tremendous flashes of lightning light up the palm forests; roads soon swimming in water; cows huddled soaking under trees; crowds of frogs hopping across the swirling road, which appears alive, green, wet and pullulating.

  TANJORE

  On the next day I took a bus to Tanjore, the old capital of the Cholas in the tenth century.

  Rain was still falling when I went inside the big temple, spattering the eroded orange stone of the gates. Inside, the campus is 1200 by 800 feet, surrounded by a pillared cloister along a magnificent forty-feet-high granite wall with an external double dado and pilasters, a beautiful and austere classicism to set beside the frenetic activity of so much Tamil architectural decoration. In the centre is a huge pyramidal vimana 216 feet high, which when it was built, in 1010, was the tallest building in India. In the spacious courtyard they were erecting bamboo marquees for Rajaraja’s birthday puja. Sheltering from the rain was a group of boys trying to organize a sponsored cycle ride round the world for charity. As the rain fell once more, I went into the shrine where there is a twelve-foot-high black linga wrapped in a white cotton skirt. Inside the ambulatory passage are eleventh-century murals which were recovered in the thirties, revealed beneath rain-damaged paintings of the seventeenth century. Little Cholan painting survives, and the ones that have been exposed and conserved here are magical.

  The technique is true fresco, painted on wet lime plaster. It affords an extraordinary glimpse into the lost world of the Cholan empire, when Cholan arms spread Hindu culture to the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Java – a strange mingling of militarism and the most exquisite delicacy. Blood and flowers, evoking strange parallels – feudal Japan? Aztecs? Soft blurred outlines as if seen through a smoky mist: lapis lazuli, terre verte, white lime, lamp black, yellow and red ochre. There are girls dancing, celestials, naked but for their waistband, bangles, anklets and elaborate hairdos.

  Inside the ambulatory there is an extraordinarily lifelike portrait of Rajaraja himself, fleshy lipped and golden skinned, deep in conversation with his white bearded guru, the poet laureate Karuvar Devar. There is Siva the destroyer of cities, full of bulging-eyed rage, tracers of paint swirling around him like time-lapse headlights. Here are the royal family worshipping their family god: the shadowy image of dancing Siva in his ring of fire, shimmering jewels faint, as if on a photographic negative, and behind the cult image is the unmistakable bowed roof of the Chit Sabha at Chidambaram.

  Upstairs in the upper ambulatory galley, unfinished at Rajaraja’s death in 1014, is a great sequence of relief panels of the 108 poses of the dance, the Bharata Natyam, in the exact sequence of the ancient textbook, the Natya Shastra. These temples were huge establishments; of 850 temple employees, 400 were dancing girls brought here from all over Chola Nadu for the dedication in 1010. They lived in the streets adjacent to the shrine, and they are all named in inscriptions on the exterior walls, giving the address of the house and the name of their native village. Now the most intimate and revealing remains of their time are hidden in dank interior passages smelling of stale ghee and bat droppings.

  The town art gallery is in the old sixteenth-century Nayak palace approached through two quadrangles, three old brick gateways and a courtyard crowded with pots of rubber plants and mother-in-law’s tongue. Here, too, is a huge sixteenth-century library of Sanskrit and Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts, its treasures include not only classical poetry but de Nobili’s manuscripts, the first Western attempt to square the Indian vision with Christian and Platonic idealism. In the old durbar room are scores of bronzes. The best are the stunning pieces from Rajaraja’s time, especially from the Tiruvengadu hoard dug up in the fifties, all swaying lines and lovely curves: louche, androgynous divinities with a hint of puppy fat above their jewelled waistbands. Ancient themes: the dancing god, the yogi, the dark mother, the benign wife – themes still endlessly reinvented today in cinema and TV. The best, perhaps, is a four-foot-high masterpiece cast in 1011 in the delta at Tiruvengadu. It shows Siva in his archaic role as Lord of the Animals. But here the wild boy of prehistory is a sinuous cowherd with a turban of snakes, legs nonchalantly crossed, left arm hanging provocatively by his hip; he is naked but for the skimpiest wrap round his thighs, which serves only to draw attention to his heavenly attributes.

  ‘You are from which country?’ It was the museum director.

  ‘England.’

  ‘Hm.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘Your own prime minister was most impressed by this image of the Lord,’ he said teasingly.

  ‘Oh yes. Which prime minister was that?’ I said, sceptical.

  ‘Mrs Margaret Thatcher,’ he replied, as if I should have known all along.

  ‘When was that?’ I said in disbelief. (When could the Bronze Lord ever have crossed paths with the Iron Lady?)

  ‘In 1982, February. He was taken to London for Festival of India exhibition. Mrs Thatcher was performing the opening ceremony. She was not I think enamoured or understanding of Indian art, but when she came to this, she stopped and stared for some time before remarking on his beauty.’

  It almost cast Mrs T in a new light.

  The bronzes are displayed on pedestals around the old durbar hall in the palace of the Tanjore Nayak kings. This was built after the break-up of the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar in 1565, when independent local kingdoms like this one were formed across the south. Tanjore in particular remained for over two centuries the centre of a brilliant culture, especially of music. But these small kingdoms were always prey to outside attack. In 1683, in the courtyard outside, the last of the Nayak kings fell in internecine warfare with his neighbours. Tanjore was under attack by the king of Madurai and the walls of the old fort eventually succumbed to a combination of grapeshot and tantric magic. Leaving no spell unturned, the attackers’ guru had filled the Cavery with thousands of squashed pumpkins, magically charged so that whoever drank the water wou
ld desert to the conquering army. Duly finding himself without an army, the last king put on his best outfit and went to an anachronistic death in golden garments studded with gems, his eyebrows pinned up with golden wires, as they were so bushy with age that he could not see out. Singing hymns to Vishnu he walked to his death with swords strapped to both hands, having ensured the immolation of his harem by a gunpowder explosion in the palace yard. A weird harbinger of the end of Tanjore’s ancient glory.

  At the back of the durbar hall, on a platform of black granite, is a white marble statue by John Flaxman of Sarfoji, the last but one Maratta ruler of Tanjore (the kings who followed the Nayaks). He wears a triangular pointed cap and his hands are joined in prayer; he was to oversee the final dissolution of the old polity in the south. In the late eighteenth century Tamil Nadu, or the Carnatic, as it was then known, became a theatre of war between the French and the British. This was a revolutionary period in the south, the real dividing line in south India between the ancient world and the modern.

  For thirty years European armies with their native allies and mercenaries trekked back and forth over the Chola lands, devastating the once fertile countryside. They turned the great enclosures of the holy sites into fortresses bristling with cannon and took potshots at the statues on the gopuras for target practice. Between 1749 and 1781 Tanjore and Chidambaram (along with many others) were attacked and occupied several times by the British or the French and their ally, Hyder Ali, the Muslim sultan of Mysore. In Tanjore the missionary Frederick Schwartz saw ‘the dead lining the streets and the living like wandering skeletons’. At Chidambaram the young Devon seaman James Scurry saw the courtyard full of chained British captives and famine-stricken Tamil refugees. Back home the names of the temples became familiar to the British public as they read gripping yarns of our brave boys imprisoned by the cunning and cruel Hyder Ali. They thrilled to the exploits of such as Lt Wilson of the Yarmouth and his bold night escape by rope over Chidambaram’s ‘stupendous walls’.