A South Indian Journey

by Michael Wood

  ‘Everything is changing these days,’ said Bharati. ‘But not us.’ Sarasu agreed, with a smile which may have been glad, or may have been sad, I couldn’t tell.

  ‘Outwardly, of course, things must move on,’ said Jaya. ‘But not in the heart.’

  Epilogue

  Hard to believe, but it is now thirteen years since I waved goodbye to the girls on Taramani station and of course, for them, as for all of India, the intervening time has been truly momentous. Mala’s father died soon after I left, almost as old as the century. He was a link with the ancient traditions of the Tamil lands and for the family it was truly the end of an era. Around that time, Mala left her cramped room near the East Gate and for a while rented a house in a sandy lane near the Ananteeswaram temple. By now her husband’s sight was entirely gone, but they made ends meet, finally selling his house in Sirkali, though they never recovered the garden with its delicious mangoes. A couple of years later, Mala got her own house for the first time, a small old Brahmin house with a tiled roof which backed onto the temple gardens. The horoscope of the house was good, and, of course, she could hardly have been nearer to Nataraja: from the well in the back yard you can hear the temple bells.

  For Mala’s sons, the nineties were slow progress, neither really making enough to be able to contemplate early marriage and the duties of a householder. But as India’s economy began to open up, so the prospects for their generation, even in a small southern town, began to improve dramatically. Kumar opened a shop for engine oil and accessories in the front of the family house, and was soon employing an assistant. After a first failure in business, Balu knuckled down to work in a garage, became a skilled mechanic, and started to earn good money. As for Mala’s daughters, in the mid nineties Punnidha had another child, whom she named Arvind, after Aurobindo, the guru of Pondi. Her two boys worked hard at school and both, inevitably I suppose, are budding computer wizards. Sarasu, meanwhile, married the manager of a hotel in Madras, but she continued to work and earn rather than starting a family, as many middle-class women are doing now all over India: not for them the traditional roles accepted by their, parents and grandparents

  It was almost the end of the millennium before Rebecca and I finally took our daughters to Tamil Nadu. So much bigger now, Madras was in the throes of transformation into a modern city, and many of the old areas had been swept away, and replaced by high-rise office blocks. Even the city’s old name had gone: for now we must call it Chennai. Our Madrasi friends’ children were now at universities in America. Prithvi herself was running a dot com company; Kamala was on a dance tour in the States. Our old hotel in Madras too had experienced a makeover, with ‘White Christmas’ playing on the piped music in the foyer – in a city with one of the oldest classical music traditions in the world. I had a sudden intuition of the British past receding like the memory of a fantastic invasion.

  We took the Cholan express down south. Past Cuddalore, we craned our necks to catch a first glimpse of the temple gopuras rising above the paddy fields on the right-hand-side of the train. Mala met us on the platform: her eyes shining with delight to see the girls for the first time.

  She had booked us into a new hotel squashed between the goddess temple, the bus stand and the cinema, which guaranteed a round-the-clock racket at festival time when all temples start their amplified devotions at 4am prompt. But most of our days were spent at Mala’s house with its little lightwell, surrounded by a colonnade of blue wooden posts. In the back, through the house, there was a yard with a well, a latrine and a small garden with a mango tree, where monkeys and chipmunks scampered. The kids helped Bharati grind spices and roll the mix for puri, they drew water from the well, and learned to eat rice by hand, using only the ends of their fingers, off a ribbed banana leaf. We visited grandmother who asked after ‘the old queen, George’s wife: is she still going strong?’ The girls loved disappearing into the nooks and crannies of her house, and in the yard the cow and her calf gave them endless delight.

  At festival time we led Maya’s husband (‘tatta’ to the girls) to the temple to visit Nataraja, where Ganesh Dikshithar, resplendent in his loincloth and stripes of ash, took the girls into the Chit Sabha. There in the flickering lamplight, peering at them through lenses as thick as window glass, he sweetly and patiently explained to widening eyes the story of the sacred dance, and the mystic meaning of the empty room behind the curtain of golden leaves.

  During the festival, East Car Street turned into the familiar glittering bazaar, where the girls bought packets of gaudy bangles for their schoolmates back home. From Mala’s front door we watched the temple cars dragged through the processional streets, and the cows with painted horns garlanded with marigolds and pom-poms. It’s a time when singers and musicians throng the town, and one night Mala brought back to the house some oduvars who had come all the way from Tinnevelly in the far south. After the meal they sang for us in her little puja space, softly, bass and tenor, songs of the beloved sacred places, Arur, Kuttalam and Tillai. Balu came over to see us from Cuddalore – he was doing very well now, his skills much in demand, and he’d put on weight – jolly, easy in his skin. Later we made trips into the countryside, to Tirupungur with its magnificent palm-fringed tank sprinkled with purple lotuses, and of course to Vaithisvarankoil, where we had tea and cake on the tank steps, and fed the temple elephant. When the time came to go, our eight-year-old cried as she watched the gopuras fall away behind the palm forests: ‘I wish I could see Nataraja every day, Mum’ she said.

  The next year Jaya sent an e-mail with a plan: to meet up in New Year 2001, the year of Kumbh Mela. This mela takes place in North India once every twelve years, at the junction of the sacred rivers Jumna and Ganga. Each time it has been by far the greatest gathering of human beings which has ever place, and each one has surpassed the previous one. This year somewhere between twenty and thirty million people were expected on the most sacred bathing night, the 24th of January, and incredibly, sixty million or more over the six weeks of the festival.

  ‘According to the astrologers this will be the most auspicious mela in a hundred and forty-four years’ wrote Jaya, who though a modern woman working for a computer firm still comfortably inhabited the old imaginal universe at the same time. ‘Mum has said she will come. So why don’t we all go together?’

  In the midst of a busy life, with our kids at school, it was, no doubt, a crazy idea but it also promised one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences. So we went out to Chidambaram for Pongal, and later that month, we made our way up to Allahabad.

  Through a Tamil religious order, Mala had booked us into a tent in the holymen’s sector, which we would share with several Tamil friends. Along with Mala and Jaya, there was Mr Parasmal, a pawnbroker from Madras, with his wife and their seventeen-year-old daughter Sangita; there was Rajesh, a shopkeeper from Mylapore, and Mr Selavadurai, a Malaysian devotee of Nataraja who had somehow become a member of Mala’s family. Unbelievably, when one considers the size of the crowds, we made a successful rendezvous at Platform 8 on Allahabad station at about 4am two days before the big night. The Tamils were almost unrecognizable, swathed in woolly hats and shawls, for the north to them is like a foreign country: a freezing land where English is the only shared language for most people. Amid a seething tumult of pilgrims from all over India – turbaned Rajastanis, Biharis, Nepalis – we found a local motor rickshaw to take us into the camp. Though the mela site spread over fifty square kilometres along the sandy bed of the Ganga, to my astonishment, we found our enclosure with no trouble at all. Our tent comfortably held sixteen people. Inside, stuffed mats laid on the white river sand made it all rather snug and comfortable. Outside, there was a ‘bathroom’ – a standpipe behind corrugated sheets – a row of latrines with canvas curtains, and a cook tent where hot sweet mixed tea was brewed at first light to warm up pilgrims returning from the early dip in the Ganga. As for eating, it is the custom at such melas that ordinary pilgrims are fed by the great monastic orders, and no so
oner had we arrived than Jaya and Sangita announced they were taking the kids off for breakfast: ‘Mum, Dad, we were invited for breakfast by the holy men. They were very nice to us. And do you know what? They’ve got no clothes on!’

  In the mornings the girls played in the sand under the washing line while gurus expostulated to their followers, and hymns to the Ganga blared out of the loudspeakers at almost ear-splitting volume.

  As is the custom, we all took a dip at the Sangam, the junction of the two rivers. In ancient Indian belief, which is half forgotten now, this was the axis mundi, the navel of the earth – or to be absolutely strict about it, the thighs of the Goddess Earth: this is why the pilgrims sail out in their boats to the line of sandbanks which rises out of the water at the precise point where the coffee brown of Ganga meets the blue green of Jumna. This is the most auspicious point of all. The place of Creation.

  And back in our tent that night, dried off and warmed up, our kids played London playground games and clapping rhymes, with Jaya and Sangita:

  ‘A sailor went to sea-sea sea

  To see what he could see-see-see…’

  While in the back of the tent, Mr Selvadurai laid out his little altar, tinkled his puja bell and quietly got on with his devotions, for that moment oblivious to the kids and all else around him:

  ‘Om Nama Sivaya…’

  ‘… And all that he could see-see-see

  Was the bottom of the deep blue sea-sea-sea’

  After the mela, we made our way to Benares and said our goodbyes at Kedar Ghat, where the Tamils had booked into a medieval pilgrim dormitory on the river. We said our goodbyes in a pool of lamplight by a late night fruit stall. Mala and Jaya hugged the kids, and Mala kissed them one last time: ‘You are good children’ she said. Praise indeed from a Tamil mother. Jaya dabbed a tear from her eye: ‘I will e-mail you from the office next week’ she shouted, as we walked away, back towards the car, and our world.

  To say we live in one world now, is a truism. But how wonderful is difference, and how diminished we will be, if the global culture takes hold everywhere, and destroys these other worlds; thoughtlessly rubbing out encoded identities which have grown over sometimes thousands of years.

  Back in Chidambaram life goes on, and the town is doing well: a couple of nice new hotels, electronics shops, a block of swish retirement apartments for devotees; they have even laid the streets with tarmac. Now of course India is booming. Third biggest economy in the world (and rising) and the south is getting many of the gains and fewer of the drawbacks. In all the recent government surveys Tamil Nadu has risen up alongside Kerala as one of the top Indian states in terms of standard of living, education, security of person and property, and quality of life.

  In the last couple of years both Mala’s sons finally felt able to marry: Kumar to the daughter of an old Vellala farmer – a salt of the earth kind of man; Balu to a sparkly village girl, not a Vellala, who has already given birth to a son. And after rejecting a number of suitors, Bharati last year finally married a man from an old Vellala family in Mayavaram – she is in her mid thirties now, so quite late by Tamil standards. So Jaya is the last to remain single, working in Chennai, while Mala juggles the family savings for one last dowry.

  At the temple, the Dikkshithars still meticulously keep up the traditions and rituals of Nataraja, though they find it hard to maintain the giant campus, their weighty inheritance from the past, with its thousand- and hundred-pillared halls, its gopuras tanks and courtyards. Ganesh Dikshithar, like everyone concerned about the state of world, is hoping to do another special puja, a ten-day ritual for world peace (which will cost a small fortune in cloths, sandal paste and food) as he says in his newsletter, ‘to energize the whole universe, to bring about ecological balance and promote long-term prosperity’. Radu phoned me from Holland recently after my last television programmes went out. He is spending much more time there, he’s running a course on Hinduism, and he has privately published a book on the mystic secret of Chidambaram which is on sale on the stalls in East Sannadhi.

  And I nearly forgot: not so long ago Kumar sent me a message from Mr Ramasamy, the video bus impressario, who had stopped by the oil shop. He has more plans – a pilgrimage to the far north of India, to the ice caves of Amarnath and Badrinath and the glacier of Gangotri, a one month epic. And of course, there is the now annual trip to Tiruchendur and Palani. ‘Why not bring the kids? As you know, it is more fun than the movies’ said Mr Ramasamy, ‘except we have the movies too! So book early, Mr Michael, to avoid disappointment!’

  Indian Gods and Goddesses

  In the south, leaving aside the plethora of village gods and goddesses, the most popular deities are Siva, Vishnu, Murugan and Sakti (the goddess)

  Siva is the wild god, creator and destroyer. He has many affinities in his attributes and temperament with the Greek Dionysus, a god of ecstasy and abandon, androgyne and aescetic. Of Siva’s many aspects, those mentioned in this book are these: Ardhanari (half-man, half-woman); Bairava (a terrible form: the protector of the universe); Bhikshatanamurti (the enchanting mendicant); Dakshinamurti (lord of the south; the teacher of knowledge) and Nataraja (lord of the. dance). Nataraja’s main cult centre is in Chidambaram: but the seven different phases of the dance also have separate shrines across Tamil Nadu. In the Saivite holy family Siva and his wife Parvati have two sons, Ganesh and Murugan. The jolly elephant-headed Ganesh (Vinayaka to Tamils) is loved all over India and is especially invoked at the start of any enterprise. Murugan is perhaps the most popular god in Tamil Nadu and is often described as the god of the Tamils. He has his own independent cult, including the six famous ‘abodes’, the three most important of which appear in this story. Saivites, incidentally, wear horizontal stripes of white ash on the forehead, often combined with the red dot of the goddess.

  The second of the big three is Vishnu. He is the necessary balance to Siva’s essence. Where Siva has many frightening aspects and is the lord of destruction, Vishnu is benign: he represents the principle of duration, the power that holds the universe together. He has had various animal and human incarnations, when he came to the world to punish the wicked; the most famous are Krishna and Rama; some would add Buddha. In addition, Vishnu has local forms, in the south Venkateswara (Balaji) of Tirupati, the richest shrine in the world, and Ranganatha on the island of Srirangam in the Cavery river, which is probably the largest temple in the world. Vaishnavites wear vertical stripes of sandal and vermilion.

  The goddess, Sakti, is popular all over India but especially so in the south; she is held to symbolize the all-pervading energy, the creative force of life. Her most important aspect is as the wife of Siva: she chiefly appears here as Kali (the frightening one) and Parvati (the benign wife and mother). She also has important local incarnations such as Sivakami in Chidambaram; Minakshi in Madurai; Katnakshi in Kanchi; and Mariamman everywhere in the villages. Sakti worshippers wear a red dot on the forehead. In the Middle Ages Saiva cults arose which made great play on Sakti worship. They said that god is manifest through the world only through the medium of Sakti, the goddess. According to them she is the agent and the material cause of creation. The universe is Sakti, unconscious matter, and all material objects as well as conscious souls are nothing but limited manifestations of her. Siva only has his power through Sakti, and the effort of all spiritual quest (for such Saivites) is to find Sakti and attain union with it/her. There are still sects, known as tantric, which follow this path.

  Glossary

  ahimsa

  non-violence

  chai

  tea

  choultry

  resting place for travellers or pilgrims

  darshan

  vision, seeing, especially of a deity

  devadasi

  ‘slave of god’ – women dancers dedicated to service in temples

  dhal

  lentil curry

  dhobi

  laundry-man; traditionally washes by hand on a stone in the river
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  dhoti

  an ample wrap for men, tucked in so that it hangs down at the waist

  Dikshithar

  here a hereditary priest of the Chidambaram temple

  Divali

  the autumn festival of lights

  data (pl. dosai)

  ground rice and lentil pancake

  ghat

  steps or landing place on a river bank; also the mountain range between Kerala and Tamil Nadu

  ghee

  clarified butter used in cooking and as oil for temple worship

  gopura

  the characteristic Tamil temple gateway

  Harijan

  ‘child of god’ – Gandhi’s name for the untouchables

  iddly (or idli)

  fluffy balls of steamed rice

  Kailash

  a mountain in western Tibet, in Hindu mythology the abode of Siva