From our seats at the back of the bus we had a good view, when the road began to descend to coast level, of the most densely populated region I have ever seen. Villages and towns merged one into another, people moved in throngs or stood talking in groups as big as a successful public meeting, the Red Flag fluttered gaily, gaudy wayside shrines contained smirking statues of the Virgin Mary, the Hammer and Sickle was neatly painted in white on ochre gable walls, Christian churches were frequently conspicuous and the hot, heavy air was laden with what a disdainful Coorg friend accurately described as ‘the classic Malabar stench of shit, piss and rotting fish’.
Judging by the literature with which they were laden, most of our fellow-passengers were students. The lovely, flower-wreathed girl beside me cherished on her lap a gigantic tome of American provenance entitled Industrial Psychology and Capitalism. She gladly allowed me to look at it but the jargon was so way-out it might as well have been in Malayalam; and I did wonder how much of it was comprehensible to its present borrower from the college library. When we passed a gleaming new church – its grounds criss-crossed with bunting made of fresh blossoms – I asked our student friend if there was some special festival on and she explained the church was to be dedicated this evening. Then she sighed and confessed that she was worried. It was her new parish church and she longed to go to the dedication service, but her father was addressing a Communist rally in a near-by town at the same time and she had promised weeks ago to help with the refreshments for the visiting speakers. So what was she to do? When I suggested that she should go early to the rally venue, do her bit on the refreshments and hurry back to the church she immediately brightened. ‘Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?’
When we arrived in Tellicherry at five-thirty we walked the length and breadth of the town, looking for accommodation, and in seven hotels were told ‘No room’. ‘This is because India has too much population,’ Rachel observed cheerfully. But I fear it is a bit more complicated than that. In three hotels an amiable youth at the desk had booked us in and was about to hand us the key when his paunchy Brahman boss appeared, gave us a hostile stare and said ‘All rooms are full!’ However, remembering the racial discrimination once practised in India by Europeans I feel I must not complain. Although two Wongs don’t make a white, as the Bishop of Hong Kong said to the couple with the blonde baby.
By seven-thirty the railway station – where I am writing this – seemed our only hope and we could have had a good free night’s rest but for an unfortunate remark by the kindly station master to the effect that the nine-fifty night train to Ernakulam would solve all our problems. Apart from the daftness of travelling when the country is invisible, I can think of few things more hellish than an eight-hour nocturnal journey without a berth in a third-class Indian railway compartment. However, Rachel seized on the idea as a monkey on a banana and resolutely closed her ears to maternal words of wisdom; so I soon gave in, feeling she had earned this concession by being, on the whole, such a reasonable travelling companion.
In the ticket hall the male queue stretched for over fifty yards – its end was out of sight – but there were only two other women in the female queue. Inevitably I was asked to get a ticket for a man, which I gladly did. He was a very young father carrying a sleeping toddler of fourteen months and whimpering, new-born twins. Their mother, he explained pathetically, was still in hospital ‘with a terrible complication – I sadly worry she will die’.
13 December. Cochin.
Between Tellicherry and here all my nightmares came true; and since Rachel enjoyed every ghastly moment of the journey it did not even serve the purpose of teaching her that Mother Knows Best. There was standing room only so she perched happily on my rucksack in the corridor when not sitting on the knees of strange men up and down the train, telling them her life-story. Apart from an hour’s doze around midnight she never closed an eye, yet remained in high spirits. It is becoming noticeable that the rougher the going the better she copes, but the same cannot be said for her ageing mamma. I stood all night by an open door in the corridor swigging Koday’s Rum and enjoying the waning moon behind the palms, while thinking how foolish it is to travel by train. Indian buses are as cheap as third-class on the railways and much more convenient from every point of view except speed (and, of course, safety).
We arrived here at 5.30 a.m. and went wandering around in a semi-coma of exhaustion looking for a hotel with a conscious chowkidar. Coming out of one narrow side-street, just as the darkness was turning grey, I walked straight into something white and hard and long and curved. Yes, an elephant’s tusk. And beyond it, looming colossal in the dawn-light, was the owner, carrying a bundle of palm-fronds the size of a haystack in his trunk and an amused mahout on his neck. A collision with an elephant was just what we had needed to cheer us up and Rachel insisted on our following him. There was something almost eerie about the speed and silence with which that huge bulk moved through the greyness along the empty streets. Indeed, the speed was so considerable that even Rachel was willing to give up when we saw the door of a tea-house opening.
We emerged, refreshed, into full daylight and soon found this enormous new tourist hotel close to the sea. By our standards it is Hiltonian: Rs.10 for a single room with private Western loo and shower attached, and a fan and large table and comfortable chair. The bed has a foam-rubber mattress and everything is newly painted and scrupulously clean. By seven o’clock Rachel was asleep, but I can never sleep in the daytime when I have reached this point of exhaustion. So I shall now lie down and do some Kerala homework.
Later. According to legend, Kerala was raised from the sea by Parasurama, a Brahman incarnation of Vishnu who undertook to perform this labour with his battle-axe as a penance for having vengefully and destructively waged war against the Kshatrias. Yet the credit for Kerala’s Golden Age is given not to Parasurama but to a demon, King Mahabali, whose reign ended when he was banished by the dwarf Vamana, another incarnation of Vishnu. Mahabali’s reign represents the pre-Aryan era when the indigenous, caste-free peoples of Kerala were in control of their own destiny; and Vamana represents the fair-skinned invaders who imposed their own rigid social system on the dark-skinned and henceforth despised natives. Every August the Malayalis celebrate the imaginary return of Mahabali, during whose reign social equality, health and prosperity were enjoyed by all the people of Kerala. And surely it is no coincidence that in this State, which has dreamed for centuries of equality, the world’s first elected Communist government came to power.
However, Kerala remains a stronghold of Brahman conservatism, for all its millions of Christians and Communists. The great nineteenth-century Hindu religious leader, Swami Vivekananda – champion of the Vedanta and founder of the Ramakrishna movement – became so confused and annoyed by the intricacies of Kerala’s castes and sub-castes that he described the whole region as ‘a lunatic asylum’. In his day – before the radical reforms brought about by that saintly Ezhava ascetic known as Shri Narayana Guru – the toddy-tapping Ezhavas had to keep sixty-four feet away from temples, thirty-six feet away from Brahmans, sixteen feet away from Nairs and twelve feet away from untouchables. Even today caste laws operate strongly here, not only among Hindus but among Christians and Jews. Over the centuries most of India’s religious minorities have been inexorably – though unofficially – made to fit the Hindu mould. The Malabar Christians are divided into numerous hostile sects and sub-sects and apart from doctrinal and liturgical bones of contention many Christians further complicate the situation by remaining loyal to the hereditary Hindu castes and sub-castes of their remote ancestors. The Roman Catholics have added yet another ludicrous refinement; one sub-sect, claiming direct descent from St Thomas’s first Indian converts, regards itself as much superior to the rest and not long ago, when a group of Ezhavas thought to improve, themselves socially by becoming Roman Catholics (or Latin Christians, as they are called here), these ‘Christian Brahmans’ protested vehemently against their church being po
lluted by Ezhavas, however thoroughly baptised. So new churches had to be specially built for the new converts, many of whom – seeing that Christianity was not, after all, in favour of the brotherhood of man – relapsed into their former position at the bottom of the Hindu pile. Even today, when an Ezhava convert comes to the home of a ‘caste-Christian’ he may not enter but must stand outside and shout his message from the garden.
I hated wakening Rachel at 10 a.m. but the alternative – to have her again awake all night – would ultimately have been more upsetting.
We spent the day exploring enjoyably though rather inefficiently. The local climate is not nearly as trying as I had expected, perhaps partly because there is so much water about and one spends half one’s time on the motor-launch buses that operate between Ernakulam and the islands of Willingdon, Mattancherry and Mulavukad.
Before lunch we strolled through the Muslim quarter of Mattancherry where men were playing cards on cramped verandas and everybody greeted us cheerfully. The drab little rows of newish, solidly built one- or two-storeyed houses were plastered with slogans in English denouncing local capitalists, yet the worst of Cochin’s poverty cannot be compared with what one sees in Bombay. Nor have I noticed here a single dirty person, of any age or condition. Even the inhabitants of the meanest hovels wear clean though often ragged clothes.
On all sides there is water – reeking, shallow canals, thick with slimy mud and crossed by rotting wooden footbridges: or the open, heavily polluted sea, always busy with boat traffic: or those fabled but (from what I have seen of them so far) much overrated backwaters. Little boys swam and played and splashed enthusiastically in the unspeakable canals but usually, I was relieved to notice, they gave themselves a shower, under a wayside fresh-water pump, before going home.
Turning one corner we came on tons of silver sardines being unloaded from long, slim boats into flat wicker baskets which were carried off to be weighed on the heads of sturdy small boys. As we stood watching, an old man sitting on a wooden crate beckoned us to join him and offered us glasses of tea. (In Indian towns a mobile tea-stall is rarely far away.) He spoke enough English to tell us that Kerala is India’s chief fish-exporting state, landing more than 30 per cent of the national total of sea-food: and then he handed me a Communist pamphlet about the redistribution of wealth. When we were leaving the water’s edge the young driver of a fish-delivery truck, who was shattering a mini-iceberg with an axe, gave us two huge lumps off the block and we went on our way through the early afternoon heat appreciatively rubbing our faces and arms to the intense amusement of the general public.
We next found ourselves in the Jewish Quarter, which consists of a long, narrow cul-de-sac with India’s most famous synagogue at the closed end. A few of the tall, whitewashed, green-shuttered houses have antique-cum-junk shops at street level, run by mild, gracious men who would not dream of pestering the tourist but are happy to talk knowledgeably about their wares, or about the history of the Malabar Jews. We chatted for over an hour to a pale, sad character with a long chestnut beard who was 35 years old but unmarried because, being a White Jew, he could only marry a White Jewess and there are few of those left in Cochin. (Thousands of Indian Jews have migrated to Israel.) I was not in the least surprised when he explained that White Jews, Black Jews and Slave Jews (the three ‘castes’ of Malabar Jewry) cannot intermarry, and that the Slave Jews are regarded as outcasts by the others and up to a few years ago were forbidden to enter the synagogues.
The White synagogue was first built in 1568, burned down in 1662 and rebuilt with Dutch help two years later. (The Dutch had just captured Cochin from the Portuguese.) Our friend volunteered to give us a conducted tour of the building and I thought it a good mark for the neighbourhood that he had no fears about leaving his valuable stock unguarded. Together we admired the great chandeliers, and the blue and white eighteenth-century Chinese floor tiles, and the ornate golden crown presented to the community by some past Maharaja of Travancore, and, most precious of all, the ancient scrolls of the Old Testament. Then I turned to my companion and asked impulsively, ‘Would you – could you – never consider marrying a Black Jewess? Because otherwise there won’t be anyone, soon, to whom all this matters?’ But he only looked at me blankly for a moment and then silently shook his head; he was unable even to consider such a shocking idea, preferring racial extinction to racial pollution. (Not that the Black and White Jews are necessarily dark and fair skinned.)
As we were walking back to our hotel a skinny little boy, wearing only a loin-cloth, came running after us. In most Indian cities I would have expected him to beg; here I was not altogether surprised – though very touched – when he presented Rachel with an hibiscus blossom, and us both with a lovely smile, before quickly running away. A tiny incident, but for me containing the essence of Kerala.
At five-fifteen Rachel heartily agreed that it was her bedtime. And now I must correct myself: this is no tourist hotel, but the Bharath Tourist Home, which means it is run by Brahmans for middle-class Indian tourists – conservative, vegetarian teetotallers who demand clean rooms, good plain cooking and a non-rowdy atmosphere. The enormous new building is staffed by charming young men who bound to attention at the touch of a bell, have at least two university degrees apiece and seem genuinely to care about the guests’ welfare. Incredible value, for 50 pence a night. Admittedly, from the dissolute mleccha’s point of view the absence of a bar is a slight disadvantage at the end of a long, hot day. But this defect is easily remedied by walking up a pleasant tree-lined road and fetching half a dozen bottles of excellent Bangalore beer from a liquor-store. Which is what I did when Rachel was abed, and then I settled down on the wide terrace-roof outside our fourth-floor room. Beyond the palmy islands across the bay the sun was sinking in a red-gold sky and when it had gone – so swiftly – a strange amber sheen lay on the water and I felt very aware of the drama of day and night: something that passes us by in the twilit north. No wonder sun-worship has played such a part in the religious history of man.
Quickly the lights went on, encircling one of the world’s finest natural harbours – for many centuries saluted as Queen of the Arabian Sea. The beginnings of Cochin’s maritime glory are too distant in time to be seen, but Kerala teak was found during the excavations at Ur, and the Phoenicians, the Chinese, the Romans and the Arabs were regular visitors long before the arrival of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and the English. St Thomas the Apostle is said to have landed on the Malabar Coast in A.D. 52 and though much scepticism is expressed about this I see no reason why he should not have chosen to do his bit here. Certainly the first European settlement in India was established in Cochin in 1502 by Vasco da Gama, who died near by on Christmas Day 1524; and on 16 December 1544 St Francis Xavier arrived on foot from the Coromandel Coast and had soon made many converts from amongst the untouchables and unapproachables.
14 December. Cochin.
Food is really scarce in Cochin at present: and an emergency can be said to exist when tourists notice a food shortage. Prices are proportionately high; bananas which elsewhere cost 15 paise here cost 60 and such basics as rice, pulses, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, sugar, eggs and milk cost four or five times as much as in Karnataka and are often not available, at any price, to the ordinary shopper in the bazaar. (Large hotels like ours, which buy in bulk, can still get most of what they need, but yesterday there were no curds – an essential item of Hindu diet and Rachel’s substitute for milk.) Today we unsuccessfully tried to get a simple rice meal in four restaurants, and since our return to the coast I have seen none of those piled stalls of fruits, vegetables and grains which are part of the normal Indian street scene. Also tea-house shelves, which elsewhere were laden with piled platters of sweet and savoury tidbits, are empty here at present. Yet the general impression is of a contented, quick-to-laugh people. Kerala’s tradition of fish- and tapioca-eating must be responsible for the spectacularly superior mental and physical development of the average Malayaili,
as compared to his fellow-peasants from mainly vegetarian states. Hunger is not a permanent feature of Malabar life and one hopes this shortage will be temporary. In India one can never be sure such shortages are not contrived by racketeers who bribe or bully the relevant local authorities into submission.
I thought today how appropriate it is that the first book to have been printed in India was published at Cochin in 1577 by the Jesuits. Never have I seen such avid readers as these Malayalis, from the small school-children who bend intently over paperback adventure stories as they travel between islands, to the wizened old rickshaw-wallahs who anywhere else in India would be illiterate but here read substantial, serious-minded daily papers. This afternoon I noticed three coolie-types on our crowded motor-launch who had obviously never worn shoes in their lives but were reading thick Malayalam volumes. These books – dog-eared and carefully jacketed in newspaper – had been borrowed, I discovered on inquiring, from college libraries run by the Shri Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, an Ezhava welfare organisation founded in 1902, long before Gandhi began his campaign to better the Harijans. And on the train the other night, in our third-class compartment, several young men were reading imported Pelican editions of erudite experts which cost Rs.25 each – that is, the price of twelve vegetarian meals with all the trimmings. Kerala State has India’s highest rate of literacy: 60·16 per cent. Granted, this need not mean much, but in Kerala millions of those 60·16 really are devoted to learning. A formidable army of secondary school and university students swarms all over Cochin, armed to the teeth with textbooks on everything from Architecture to Zoology. And I mean ‘formidable army’. Most of these youngsters cannot hope for even the meanest sort of white-collar job but are unlikely to accept, with traditional Indian fatalism, their share of the subcontinent’s misfortunes.
On a Shoestring to Coorg Page 13
