On a Shoestring to Coorg

by Dervla Murphy

  Other books by Dervla Murphy published by the Overlook Press

  FULL TILT: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

  EIGHT FEET IN THE ANDES

  THE WAITING LAND: A Spell in Nepal

  MUDDLING THROUGH IN MADAGASCAR

  Copyright

  First published in 1989 by

  The Overlook Press

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  Copyright © 1976 John Murray, Ltd.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-573-9

  To Rachel and her father

  with love and gratitude

  It may yet be found that the traveller who tosses up at every cross-roads will arrive first at the goal.

  from The Thoughts of Wi Wong

  by Arland Ussher

  Contents

  Other books by Dervla Murphy published by the Overlook Press:

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 Initiation in Bombay

  Chapter 2 Hippies in Goa

  Chapter 3 Tibetans in Mundgod

  Chapter 4 Discovering Coorg

  Chapter 5 Musings in Mysore

  Chapter 6 Andanipura Farm

  Chapter 7 The Huthri Festival

  Chapter 8 A Glance at Kerala: Cochin’s Kathakali Dance

  Chapter 9 Pilgrims at Cape Comorin: Family Life in Tamil Nadu

  Chapter 10 On the Coast of Coromandel

  Chapter 11 Fever in Madurai: Wildlife in Periyar

  Chapter 12 Ancestor Veneration in Devangeri

  Chapter 13 Caste in Coorg

  Chapter 14 Forest Funeral

  Chapter 15 A Naming Ceremony and a Wedding

  Chapter 16 Praying and Dancing

  Epilogue

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Map

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks must go in many directions: to A. C. Thimmiah and Dr Chengappa of Virajpet, who made it possible for us to settle in Coorg; to the Bernstorffs of New Ross, who had us to stay for three months while I was writing this book and created a perfect background atmosphere of sympathetic encouragement; to Alison Mills and Karen Davenport who gallantly typed from an almost illegible manuscript without error or complaint; to Diana Murray who tactfully but relentlessly de-purpled many passages, and provided endless inspiration and comfort during the darkest hours of Revision; to Jane Boulenger and John Gibbins who helped prepare a chaotic typescript for the printer; to Patsy Truell who helped with the index and with correcting the proofs and to the editors of Blackwood’s Magazine and The Lish Times in which some extracts first appeared.

  Prologue

  In August 1973 it was exactly five years since I had been outside Europe. Therefore feet and pen were equally itchy and I decided that this was the moment – before schooling started in earnest – to share with my daughter Rachel the stimulation of a non-European journey. Already she had twice proved, on European testing-grounds, that she could enjoy short bouts of travelling rough: but I did realise that no 5-year-old could be expected to proceed as speedily as my faithful bicycle or as sturdily as my Ethiopian mule.

  A period of happy dithering followed; I consulted the atlas almost hourly and received much conflicting advice. One friend, a political journalist, thought International Harmony badly needed a book on China by D. M. and urged me to write to the Chinese Embassy in London. I obeyed, ingratiatingly quoting a pro-Mao passage from my book on Nepal, but there was no reply. From Australia, another friend who works in god-forsaken mines wrote that the outback has much more to it than Europeans imagine; that the animal life and landscapes are fantastic; that if I avoided all cities I would adore the place and could write a pornographic classic about the mining subculture. From Kuala Lumpur, a friend’s daughter who had been teaching in Malaysia for two years almost succeeded in persuading me that it is the only country worth an intelligent person’s attention; and another friend was adamant that anybody who has neglected to walk through the Pindus mountains knows nothing of the more sublime joys of travel.

  Most tempting of all, however, were the letters from a charmingly eccentric millionaire who repeatedly invited us out to explore the mountains of Central Mexico. His Mexican estate is embedded in primeval jungle and the nearest town of any size is many miles away. I liked the sound of all this, and one does not have to be a nasty calculating bitch to appreciate the advantages of a tame millionaire in the background.

  Meanwhile, my publisher (who is Rachel’s godfather and takes his duties seriously) was expressing the opinion that for me there is a book in Scotland. And left to myself I rather fancied Madagascar or New Guinea – though neither, I realised, is the ideal country in which to blood a 5-year-old.

  In the end I settled for Mexico, under the influence of the superb photographs that arrived in the post at least once a month. Included were views of a Gothic-style temple recently built in the middle of a mountain torrent for a colony of tame ducks who had found the surrounding terrain uncomfortable. One day I showed these pictures to an imaginative friend who said, ‘If that’s what he’s built for his ducks, what will he build for you?’

  Everybody was suitably impressed/censorious/envious/ incredulous when I announced that soon I was going to Mexico to live with a millionaire in a jungle. But then a friend came to stay, who had just returned from India, and as we talked a most delightful feeling took possession of me.

  I recognised it at once, though some years had passed since I last felt it. It was an excitement amounting almost to intoxication, a surging impatience that quickened the pulse. It was a delicious restlessness, a stirring of the imagination, a longing of the heart, a thirst of the spirit. It meant that I did not want to go to Thailand, Greece, Kenya, Australia, Malaysia, Dhagestan, Tanzania, Scotland, Madagascar, New Guinea, Mexico or anywhere other than India. It was absurd – and, at that stage of my planning, downright inconvenient. But I welcomed it.

  My choice of Mexico had been quite arbitrary. All the other possibilities had seemed equally attractive and just as likely to bear readable fruit; and this detachment had been, I now realised, a bad omen. If travel is to be more than a relaxing break, or a fascinating job, the traveller’s interest, enthusiasm and curiosity must be reinforced by an emotional conviction that at present there is only one place worth visiting.

  Initially I felt bewildered by this effervescence of what must have been fermenting for years in hidden corners of my mind. Far from having fallen in love with India during previous visits I had been repelled by some aspects of Hindu life, irritated by others, uneasily baffled by most and consciously attracted by very few. On balance I had found the Indians less easy to get on with than the Pakistanis and Nepalese – to say nothing of the Afghans and Tibetans – and by making this fact too plain in my first book I had deeply offended a number of people.

  Why, then, my compulsion to go back? I had no quasi-mystical ambition to improve my soul by contact with Hindu spirituality, nor had I forgotten the grim details of everyday Indian life – the dehumanising poverty, the often deliberately maimed beggars, the prevaricating petty officials, the heat, the flies, the dust, the stinks, the pilfering. Is it, perhaps, that at a certain level we are more attracted by complexities and evasions, secrets and sub
tleties, enigmas and paradoxes, unpredictability and apparent chaos, than by simplicity, straightforwardness, dependability and apparent order? It may be that in the former qualities we intuitively recognise reality, and in the latter that degree of artificiality which is essential for the smooth running of a rationalistic, materialistic society.

  Certainly I had always been aware – without always being prepared to admit it – that my more unsympathetic responses to Hindu culture exposed a personal limitation rather than the defects of Indian civilisation. In other words, India represented a challenge that I, like countless other Europeans, had run away from. However, unlike the impregnably self-assured Victorian imperialists I could not convince myself that a failure to appreciate India was a mark of virtue. So perhaps it is not really surprising that as the time-gap widened between India and me the pull to return to the scene of my defeat and try again operated like an undertow in the unconscious – growing steadily stronger until, on that September evening, it took command.

  By next day, however, my euphoria had ebbed slightly and I was seeing this return to India as a dual challenge. Apart from the subtle, impersonal challenge of India itself, there would be the personal challenge posed by trying to achieve a successful fusion of two roles: mother and traveller. It seemed those roles must inevitably clash and at moments I doubted if they could ever be made to dovetail. Then I realised that from the outset one role had to be given precedence: otherwise the whole experience would be flawed, for both of us, by my inner conflicts. So I decided to organise our journey as Rachel’s apprenticeship to serious travelling.

  In effect, this decision meant not organising it; we would fly to Bombay and slowly wander south to Cape Comorin, planning our route on a day-to-day basis. As things turned out, these inconsequential ramblings had the happiest results. In South-West India, between the Malabar coast and the Carnatic, we both fell in love with the little-known province of Coorg. And there we stayed for two months.

  At Heathrow there was a cheerful man behind the weighing-machine and I felt rather smug when he said – ‘So you’re off to India for a short week-end?’

  I think I can claim to have perfected the art of travelling light. Neither my medium-sized rucksack nor Rachel’s mini-rucksack was quite full, yet no essential had been left behind. We were even carrying some luxuries; seven minute rubber animals in a tin box: crayons and felt pens: a favourite furry squirrel: one story-book (a Rupert Bear annual – not my choice) and half a dozen school-books. For four months in South India one needs much less kit than for four weeks in Europe. From November to March the weather is warm and dry, and light clothing costs so little in the bazaars that our wardrobe consisted only of a change of underwear. Rachel’s pack held Squirrel Nutkin, our sponge-bag and our first-aid kit, water-purifying pills, antiseptic ointment, Band-Aids, multi-vitamin capsules and anti-dysentery tablets. My pack held a bathing-costume, our sleeping-bags, books, notebooks and maps.

  As our plane took off Rachel plunged into conversation with an amused gentleman from Kerala and I suddenly became conscious of having embarked on an adventure that would demand mental rather than physical stamina. This was to be my first long journey with a human travelling-companion, and I am a person who needs solitude. Yet there were obvious compensations. I regard other adults – however congenial – as a form of insulation against the immediate impact of travelling experiences; but small children form links, not barriers. And I was enjoying a delightful ‘holiday feeling’, knowing this to be the start not of an endurance test but of a carefree journey ‘as the spirit moved us’.

  1

  Initiation in Bombay

  16 November. Y.W.C.A. Hostel, Bombay.

  Somewhere Apa Pant has remarked that air-travellers arrive in two instalments and for me this is Disembodied Day, that dreamlike interval before the mind has caught up with the body; and because a natural parsimony compels me to eat all the meals served en route the body in question feels so overfed I wish it could have been left behind, too.

  Oddly enough, Rachel seems immune to jet-lag, despite having had less than three hours’ sleep. I chose to stay in this hostel for her sake, thinking it would serve as a not too unfamiliar half-way house between Europe and Asia. But such solicitude was soon proved needless and I last saw her disappearing up the street with two new-found Indian friends. It seems she has gone to lunch with someone; I felt too exhausted to find out exactly with whom or where.

  Of course even I was buoyed up, for the first few hours after our landing at 7.00 a.m., by the simple fact of being back in India. Emerging from the cool plane into warm, dense air (72 °F., according to official information) I was instantly overwhelmed by that celebrated odour of India which I had last smelt many hundreds of miles away, in Delhi. It seemed to symbolise the profound – if not always apparent – unity of this country. And it is not inappropriate that one’s first response to India should involve that sensual experience least amenable to analysis or description.

  Outside the airport buildings the scores of waiting taxi-wallahs made little effort to capture us – no doubt they understand by now the financial implications of a rucksack – and with the roar of jets in the background we walked for the next forty minutes through scenes of poverty, filth and squalor which make exaggeration impossible. On flat stretches of wasteland dozens of men were performing their morning duty, unselfconsciously squatting, with rusty tins of water to hand and sometimes a hopeful pig in the background. The Hindu opening his bowels must be the world’s greatest mass-manifestation of the ostrich-mentality. Your average Hindu is an extremely modest man, but because he can’t see you, having his gaze fixed on the ground, he will serenely evacuate while hundreds of people pass to and fro near by.

  So we proceeded, with bougainvillaea gloriously flourishing on one side of the highway and the stench of fresh excrement drifting to us from the other. All around were uncountable thousands of homes – many no bigger than small tents – constructed of bamboo matting, or driftwood, or beaten kerosene tins. Between and in these shelters people seethed like so many ants, and diseased pi-dogs nosed through stinking muck, and shrivelled-looking cattle were being driven on to the dusty, grey-green wasteland to eat Shiva-alone-knows what. After some time Rachel observed dispassionately, ‘I must say this place seems rather shattered’ – a tolerably graphic description of the outskirts of Bombay. Yet I was not overcome by that nauseated depression which similar scenes induced ten years ago. Perhaps I am no longer quite sure that India’s dire poverty is worse than the dire affluence through which we had been driving twelve hours earlier in London.

  Outside one sagging bamboo shelter at the edge of the road a graceful, dark-skinned young woman was washing her feet, using water taken from a stagnant, reeking pond with a lid of bright green scum. She looked up as we passed, and met my eyes, and smiled at us: and her smile had a quality rarely found in modern Europe. It recalled something I had read on the plane, in Dr Radhakrishnan’s essay on ‘Ethics’. ‘When the soul is at peace, the greatest sorrows are borne lightly. Life becomes more natural and confident. Changes in outer conditions do not disturb. We let our life flow of itself as the sea heaves or the flower blooms.’

  Presently a taxi slowed beside us and the driver suggested – ‘You go Gateway of India for only Rs.40?’* He dropped abruptly and unashamedly to Rs.10 on realising I was no newcomer to India. Then, when I still shook my head, he looked sympathetic and advised us to board an approaching city-bound bus. The fare, he said, would be only 40 paise for me and 20 paise for ‘the baby’.

  The bus was crammed and we were nowhere near a scheduled stop. Yet the driver obligingly halted and the conductor curtly ordered a barefooted youth with dirty, matted hair – probably a tribal outcaste – to give up his seat to the foreigners. The youth obeyed at once, but sullenly; and his resentful glare so embarrassed me that I remained standing beside him while Rachel sat down. Then another young man, weedy-looking but neatly dressed, offered me his seat, told me his name wa
s Ram and asked, ‘Where is your native place?’ He thought Glasgow was the capital of Ireland but claimed to be a Times of India staff reporter.

  A cool breeze freshened the windowless bus as we slowly jolted through mile after mile of slums, semi-slums and swarming bazaars. Rachel was fascinated to see bananas growing on trees, cows lying on city pavements and a crow boldly swooping down to steal a piece of toast off a street-vendor’s stall. And I was relieved to feel myself rejoicing. On the plane it had suddenly occurred to me that this return could prove a dreadful mistake. But now, looking affectionately out at India’s least attractive urban-slum aspect, I knew it was no such thing.

  Ram followed us off the bus and spent over two hours – ‘It is my duty …’ – helping us to locate this hostel. I can never come to terms with his type of doggedly helpful but obtuse Indian. To us such people seem too self-consciously altruistic as they offer help or hospitality, though in fact this is a gross misinterpretation of their state of mind. Nevertheless, the mleccha – the foreigner – is usually helped by Indians like Ram not because the Indian cares about the individual’s fate but because he regards the needful stranger as an incidental source of religious merit, a messenger from the gods who, if given aid, will act as a channel for valuable blessings. Granted, this is a nice idea: but from the mleccha’s point of view it tends to stunt many of his relationships with Indians. Few Westerners enjoy being discounted as individuals; and most travellers like to be able to feel that each new acquaintance is potentially a new friend.

  This morning I would have much preferred to find my own way and we might well have got there sooner without a guide who refused to admit that we were repeatedly being sent astray. Every one of whom we sought assistance gave us a different set of wrong directions with complete assurance. I had forgotten the Indians’ propensity for being ultra-dogmatic when in fact they haven’t a clue; and on a hot day in a big city with a small child after a sleepless night I found it excessively trying. Moreover, because Ram meant so well, and yet was being so stupid and obstinate, I felt increasingly irritated and ungrateful and therefore guilty. It is on such trivia that everyday Indo-European relations most often founder.