On a Shoestring to Coorg

by Dervla Murphy

  When we got back to our Bharath Home I insisted on Rachel’s resting for an hour because tonight she is again going out on the tiles to see a performance of Kerala’s unique Kathakali dance. According to the tourist office bumph, this is a ‘2,000-year-old Pantomime Kerala Dance’. Maybe it is – what are 2,000 years in India? – but according to the distinguished historian Nilakanta Sastri (who travels in my rucksack), ‘Recent research has shown that the first Attakathas were composed towards the close of the fifteenth century.’ Kathakali means ‘story-play’ and is specifically an educational religious dance based on the ancient puranas, which recount the adventures and teachings of the gods and heroes of Indian mythology. Traditionally it is performed only by certain families belonging to the devadasi community, a sub-caste associated with that temple prostitution which made so many mem-sahibs curl up at the edges. Tonight’s performance is being given by the ‘See India Foundation Troupe’ which performs every evening, except Thursdays; so I suppose it will be a rather watered-down tourists’ version. Yet the lives of the members of the troupe sound extremely gruelling and austere and not in the least commercialised. Training starts at the age of five and throughout the next fifteen years continues for twelve hours daily: two hours a day are devoted simply to exercising the eye-muscles. This Cochin troupe was founded by Guru Gopala Paniker, now 97 years old, who last year received from President Giri the ‘India’s Greatest Artiste Today’ award. His sons Shivaram, the world-famous dancer, and P. K. Devan, the Director, are passing the tradition on – still assisted by their father, who continues daily to massage the student dancers by trampling on them with his bare feet. And now off we go, to see the result for ourselves.

  Later. What to say? How to say it? I had read quite a bit about Kathakali – how ancient and awe-inspiring it is, how interesting and skilful and exotic. But no one had told me how exalting and humbling it is, how exhilarating and poignant, how quintessentially Indian, how triumphantly an affirmation of the Immanence of the Divine. I have often seen Indian dancing before and always enjoyed it but this was something quite different: less an entertainment than an escape into another sphere – and at the same time an encounter with an unfamiliar area of oneself.

  The theatre is in the garden of a small bungalow up a narrow side-street and consists of a wooden outdoor stage, some ten feet by twelve, under an awning of coconut matting. In front of the stage a handsome brass pedestal lamp, four feet high and filled with coconut oil, burns brightly by way of footlights. Visitors are greeted on arrival by P. K. Devan – quiet, dignified, erudite – a man who at once makes it plain that all this is something more than tourist-bait. Significantly, too, the three musicians begin to play at the back of the stage about an hour before the dancing starts, for this whole ritual has a meaning and a purpose of its own, quite apart from the business of diverting the audience. Two of the musicians are drummers, using the Chenda (played with two sticks) and the Maddalam (played with the hands); the third is a singer with cymbals who tells the story as the dancers dance.

  One hundred chairs had been arranged in rows before the stage, under the starry sky, but this evening the audience consisted only of ourselves and an elderly Danish woman. Normally an audience of three would leave those three feeling too embarrassed on behalf of the performers to enjoy themselves, and the performers too discouraged to give of their best. But one soon realises that ordinary criteria do not apply to Kathakali. Within moments of the dancers’ appearing it is evident that to them it does not matter in the least whether three or three hundred people turn up on any given occasion. No one has a sharper nose than I for phoney tourist gimmicks and this Kathakali performance is unquestionably the work of men who feel the religious content of the dance to be of prime importance.

  Before the dance began P. K. Devan outlined the story we were about to see enacted and simply explained the 2000-years-old Kathakali technique. The language of gestures has been so developed that by using various combinations of the twenty-four basic hand positions over 800 words may be formed. Also, every movement of the eyes has a specific meaning intelligible to initiates, and the miming and footwork are equally eloquent. The elaborate make-up has to be applied by experts, a process which is gone through slowly and systematically, in solemn silence, and takes two or three hours. Each face is painted all over: green for good characters, black for bad, red for villains and pink for women and saints. These colours must be procured by crushing certain rare local stones or powdering the bark of sacred trees: and when they have been applied the dancer pauses for a moment, to pray with uplifted hands, before moving out of the dressing-room. The fantastic, heavily jewelled brocade costumes are themselves works of art which have passed down from generation to generation. Their weird loveliness is so strange that Rachel exclaimed, ‘These must be magic clothes!’

  Indeed, magic is perhaps the best word with which to sum up this whole experience. I felt utterly bewitched as time passed and the spell was woven more and more intricately around us. Kathakali dancer/actors make no sound, apart from a few animal-like grunts occasionally emitted by the villain, and in comparison with their slight, exquisitely stylised movements even the most inspired ballet-dancing seems crude. Without having seen them I could never have believed it possible to produce, through the controlled use of eye, face, hand and foot muscles, such an effect of ineffable beauty, adding up to what can only be described as a prayer in movement.

  9

  Pilgrims at Cape Comorin: Family Life in Tamil Nadu

  15 December. Trivandrum.

  Statistics mean something to me only when I can see them, as you might say, and I could certainly see them today during our 136-mile bus journey from Cochin to Trivandrum. In area Kerala is one of the smallest Indian states (38,855 square kilometres), but its population of 22 million puts it amongst the most densely populated regions in the world. Moreover, one-third of its area is forest and mountain so some districts have 1,124 people to the square kilometre. Along the coastal strip each village merges into the next and little seems to have changed since Ibn Batuta wrote – some five centuries ago – ‘The whole of the way by land lies under the shade of trees, and in the space of two months’ journey there is not one span free from cultivation; everybody has his garden and his house is planted in the middle of it.’ But in one respect things have been changing for the worse: as the people increase, erosion is diminishing the land area.

  Yet Kerala is not depressing; the Malayalis look far better developed than the average crowd to be seen on a European beach and since men and children wear the minimum of clothing (or none) one can fully appreciate their magnificent physiques. (Incidentally, it is only quite recently that Ezhava women have been allowed to cover themselves above the waist in the presence of the Brahman and Nair castes.)

  Trivandrum is a hilly, higgledy-piggledy city full of trees and quite attractive, though no urban conglomeration of some 400,000 people can truthfully be said to excite me. Outside the bus stand an ebony-skinned youth – barefooted and extraordinarily handsome – offered to guide us to a good but cheap hotel and led us up a broad street, all the while begging me to hire a coolie to carry my rucksack. He said he hated to see me shouldering it yet could not possibly carry anything himself – not even my water-bottle or canvas bag of books.

  Soon we had been installed in a twin-bedded room, with its own primitive shower and latrine, for Rs.5 plus another Rs.5 deposit, which I suppose is intended to ensure the guests don’t make off with the bedding. When I handed 50 paise to our guide he waved it aside and smiled and bowed, and said it was his joy to help us, and vanished. No doubt the hotel rewards him, but how often in India does a barefooted boy decline a tip? I could not help reading a certain significance into his use of the word ‘joy’ where most Indians use ‘duty’. It seemed a nice illustration of the average Malayalis’ lighthearted approach to life.

  We spent the afternoon drifting around talking to people rather than systematically sightseeing. In some respects the
southern princely states of Mysore, Cochin and Travancore were far more advanced at Independence than British India – Travancore, especially, had a reputation for being prudently progressive without being pseudo-European. For generations its rulers had treated State revenues as public funds rather than as their own private property and less than 5 per cent was kept for the use of the Maharaja and his mother, through whom (the state being a matriarchy) he had come to the throne. The ‘palace’ was a simple white house on a hill, and throughout the 1930s one-fifth of the revenue was devoted to education.

  The last Dewan of Travancore, Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar, courageously changed the law to allow Harijans into the temples and made possible Kerala’s present-day industrial expansion. But he was an autocrat who for years strangled every popular political movement at birth. During the pre-Independence controversy about the fate of the Princely States he announced peremptorily that when power was transferred Travancore would become a sovereign state: whereupon there was a spontaneous revolution and an attempted assassination of the Dewan, followed by his resignation and a hasty announcement from the Maharaja that his rajyam would of course become part of the Indian Union.

  We spent a couple of hours strolling through the green and pleasant university grounds, talking with students and staff. Here in the midst of their problems it is easy to sympathise with Kerala’s Communists, who of course are not in the least like non-Indian Communists. Their strongly held political beliefs seem to co-exist quite comfortably with a fervent devotion to Harihara, pilgrimages to Guruvayur and Sabarimala, an unquestioning acceptance of made marriages and the pronouncements of astrologers, reunions for joint-family pujas – and so on and so forth. In fact I can’t think why they don’t call themselves something else.

  India’s two Communist parties (both of which claim to be the One True Party) are known as the Right Communists (Soviet) and the Left Communists (Chinese). The General Secretary of the Left, for all India, is an outstanding political genius called Elamkulam Manakal Sankaran Namboodiripad. (Who must surely say to his friends, ‘Call me El’.) This gentleman comes of the highest sub-caste in Kerala, a most rarefied élite of academic aristocrats, and while Chief Minister of the first Communist government he was worshipped by millions as a ‘holy man’. This was even before his 1969 Land Reform Act, which prescribed the lowest land ceiling in India, allowing no more than five standard acres for one person, ten for a family of between two and five members, and one acre each extra for every additional member, after five. The young economics lecturer who provided me with these figures insisted on writing them down himself in my notebook. ‘You must not forget,’ he said. ‘Our Communist government really did give “the land to the tiller” – not just talk about doing it. Now we have no landless peasants – nobody can be evicted – the cultivator has full ownership. But next it is most important to make him have less children.’

  This morning in Cochin we woke to a grey sky and all day the air felt deliciously cool. Then at sunset we heard our first rain since leaving home, exactly a month ago, and it is still slashing down with monsoon-like fury.

  16 December. Cape Comorin.

  This evening I have come to the conclusion that India – the whole Indian Dharma – is peculiarly tourist-proof. By which I mean it is too individual, too absorbent, too fortified by its own curious integrity, to be vulnerable to those slings and arrows of outrageous vulgarity which have killed the loveliness of so many places since tourism became big business. I had expected to find Cape Comorin despoiled, yet it remains first and foremost a place of pilgrimage: a holy place, as it has been for centuries beyond counting. Like so many of Hinduism’s less accessible pilgrimage sites, it is marked by an extraordinary atmosphere of quiet excitement, of devout gaiety; and added to this is its own unique flavour. From the bus one suddenly sees the sea – or rather, three seas – and a temple on a rock about half a mile off-shore. And that’s it. One has reached the end of India.

  Although we arrived on a Sunday afternoon, in the midst of a local Roman Catholic festival, the crowds were not excessive and there was not one other non-Indian to be seen. Having booked into a Rs.5 windowless cell – swarming with ants – we dumped our kit and hastened to the sea. Cape Comorin is emphatically final – a tapering point of rock which is unmistakably farther south than the rest of the coast. Here steps lead down to the confluence of the Gulf of Mannar, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea; and in this water, regarded as most sacred by Hindus, the pilgrims ‘take bath’ and do puja. Fierce cross-currents and occasional sharks make the sea hazardous, so massive boulders have been cleverly rearranged to prevent pilgrims (or Irish swimming fanatics) from being swept away or eaten alive. A memorable bathe is the result, as during the northeast monsoon swimmers are tossed to and fro like corks within this safe area of swirling foam and crashing waves. And while being tossed one inevitably thinks of that other frontier, of rock and eternal snow – the long base of the Indian triangle, 2,000 miles away – and of the 1,138,814 square miles and almost 600 million people in between. And then one marvels at the durability, elusiveness and strange beauty of that mixture of rank superstition and refined metaphysics which unites the shepherds of the snow-bound Himalayan valleys to the fishermen of the sun-flayed Coromandel Coast.

  Rachel had a blissful time making castles in a sandy cove just west of the bathing-pool, but to avoid a popular public latrine we had to keep well below the high-water mark. The sand around Cape Comorin is famous throughout India and pilgrims buy tiny bags of it to take home. It is not simply golden, but – in patches – pure white, rose pink, pale yellow, charcoal grey and dark red. Scientists describe these sands as monazite and ilmenite: Hindus say they represent the various dishes once served here at a wedding of the Gods.

  Throughout the afternoon I repeatedly plunged back into the bathing-pool since in my estimation the entertainment value of sand is not great, however variegated its hues; and I appreciated the pilgrims not objecting to a mleccha using their sacred pool blatantly for fun. In fact no Indian was using it today, because of the storm; instead they were ritually ducking themselves off Rachel’s bit of sandy beach. Everyone was welcoming, though to decent Hindus a woman in a bathing-suit is a most shocking sight. Hindu women always enter the water fully dressed and when they emerge, with their thin saris clinging to their bodies, they reveal a great deal more than I do in my black, ultra-decorous, Edwardian-style costume. Most of today’s pilgrims seem to belong to the well-off élite and this evening I have spoken to people from Bombay, Ludhiana, Delhi, Lucknow, Calcutta and Madras. All but the Madrassis have to use English as their only possible means of communication with the Tamil or Malayalam-speaking locals; there is considerably more resemblance between Hindi and Irish than between Hindi and Tamil.

  Traditionally sunrise and sunset are the most solemn moments at Cape Comorin, as the sun may be seen rising out of one ocean and sinking into another. Therefore at six o’clock we joined the small crowd who had gathered on a huge, smooth black rock against which great green rollers were hurling themselves, sending up curtains of spray thirty feet high. Because of cloud nobody actually saw the sun setting, but the whole western sky became a glory of fast-changing colours – lovelier than it could possibly have been if cloudless. This, however, was no consolation to those for whom it is important to witness the sun touching and being quenched by the ocean.

  Having supped in a tiny vegetarian restaurant we stepped out into the darkness and saw, on the east shore of the Cape, a vision seemingly from fairyland. For a moment I was dazzled into incomprehension by the bewildering beauty of the spectacle; then I realised that thousands of brilliant, multi-coloured electric bulbs were outlining the pseudo-Gothic Catholic cathedral against the blackness of the sea. The Indians are very good at this sort of thing and Rachel became quite breathless with excitement. We decided to find our way back to the hotel by the cathedral and went stumbling over piles of excrement, on a pitch-dark maidan, before finding a narrow street thronged
with excited, jostling, shouting Christians – and their low-caste Hindu neighbours – on the way to the evening’s festivities.

  Inside the church hundreds of pilgrims, their faces aglow with love, were queuing to touch the feet of a gaudy statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, whose feast-day this is. They kissed their finger-tips when they had laid them on the worn plaster feet, and then they touched the feet again and, placing both hands on the tops of their heads, bowed low and retreated backwards from the Virgin’s ‘presence’. Some had tears trickling down their cheeks as they frantically invoked the statue’s help, others laughed joyously as they stroked the toes or caressed the robes of their beloved. These people are amongst the poorest of India’s poor, descended from the sudras and untouchables baptised by Portuguese missionaries over 400 years ago, and it is plain that they have close personal relationships with their favourite statues – relationships of which some theologians might not approve. But what matter? If the Divine is everywhere it is in chunks of plaster and good luck to those who can find it there.

  The general scene within that vast, unfurnished church reminded me of a typical Indian railway-station platform between trains. Many pilgrims were lying asleep on the cool stone floor, their cotton wraps covering their heads; many others were squatting about in family groups, eating meagre suppers out of banana leaves, and some were just sitting cross-legged, staring into space. Our arrival electrified the majority and as usual Rachel was seized and cuddled and tickled and pinched and the pretence of kidnapping her enacted. This is the commonest Indian game with a small child and though Rachel knows it to be a joke she still finds it slightly alarming; obviously the mere thought of being separated from mamma in a foreign land is classic material for 5-year-old nightmares. This evening she kept a stiff upper lip but I could see her peering anxiously at me from amidst a tangle of dark arms and legs and faces, lit by white teeth and flashing, laughing eyes. Indians can be quite rough in their play and sometimes she emerges from this sort of fracas with slight scratches or bruises. During the past few days I have noticed her becoming increasingly irritated by the Indians’ obsessive compulsion to handle her – which is an understandable reaction on her part, but I have explained she must try not to hurt their feelings. I suppose her colour fascinates them. By now she is as brown all over as a Punjabi, but that still leaves her a good deal lighter than most South Indians.