On a Shoestring to Coorg

by Dervla Murphy

  The nineteen-point official programme for the ‘propagation, development and enrichment of Hindi’ seems utterly artificial – another, self-imposed, cross for India to bear. South Indians naturally wish the funds and energies now being expended on Hindi could be diverted to providing free primary education in those areas where it is not yet available, or to expanding the well-planned Farmers’ Functional Literacy Programme, which has already made some 80,000 adult farmers more accessible to advice on how to increase food production.

  The status of the English language provokes a more complex set of arguments, though the two controversies overlap when opponents of Hindi affirm that English – or ‘Indish’, as Indianised English is often called – is the obvious lingua franca for India. An increasing number of educated Indians long to reclaim their own culture and do not believe this can be done while India’s intellectual life is dominated by an English-speaking, English-reading and therefore English-thinking élite. For centuries Indian culture – apart from music and the dance – has been moribund, submerged first by the Mughals and then by that tidal wave of anglicisation which inundated the land as a result of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s historic ‘Minute’ of 2 February 1835.

  Macaulay envisaged ‘a class of people who can act as intermediaries between us and the millions we govern: English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ – and quite soon India had got what Macaulay wanted. The then Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, had himself referred six years earlier to ‘the British language, the key to all improvements’; and on 7 March 1835, with the support of Macaulay and Ram Mohan Roy, leader of the more progressive Bengali intellectuals, he made English the official language of the subcontinent – instead of Persian, the language of the Mughal court.

  Since then, speaking English and sending children to English-medium schools has acquired an absurd snob-value. Those who have the means and leisure to practise the arts themselves, or to support creative Indians in practical ways, now too often feel it necessary to despise their own culture. Also, educational aims have become confused, with students attaching greater significance to the English language, as such, than to those subjects they are supposed to be mastering through the medium of English. More important still, the fact that so many of the governing classes live in a cultural world apart means they tend to take an unreal view of India’s basic problems.

  In 1971 the Simla Congress of Indian Writers declared, ‘The inescapable reality is that English continues to be the only expedient language throughout India.’ This is very true, but what does seem necessary is an admission that it must remain a minority language – though this would involve switching to Indian languages in the universities. At present 11 million, or 2 per cent of the population, are described as ‘English-knowing’, but I have been warned that there is a sinister difference between ‘English-knowing’ and ‘English-speaking’. The former applies to those who appear in the statistics as having studied English at school, the latter to the half-million or so who use the language a good deal more fluently and precisely than the average Englishman.

  The happiest solution would be if English in India came to have the status of French in England and were regarded as an asset which, though valuable, is not essential to everybody’s intellectual well-being. Then the lack of it need breed no inferiority complexes, nor deter creative Indian thinkers and writers from using their own ancient languages – which were expressing sophisticated philosophical concepts while Europeans were still grunting in holes in the ground.

  27 January.

  Every day I fall more seriously in love with Coorg; it is the only place, outside of my own little corner of Ireland, where I could imagine myself happy to live permanently. Several of our neighbours have wonderingly asked me ‘Don’t you get bored, walking so much through the paddy and the forest?’ And they look equally delighted and puzzled when I assure them that, far from getting bored, I every day derive more pleasure from their lovely land. Wherever one looks there is beauty, none of it spectacular or wild or dramatic but all of it profoundly satisfying. The light has that exhilarating clarity one expects only at a much higher altitude, the colours glow with magical vitality and the very air tastes good. Then there is the warmth of the Coorg welcome, which makes one feel soaked in contentment as the land itself is soaked in golden sunshine.

  Coorg women have traditionally led freer and more active lives than most high-caste Hindu ladies, and the secretary/accountant of Devangeri’s Co-operative Society is a competent, elegant young woman named Jagi Chinnappa, who lives about two miles away with her widowed mother, elder brother and 9-year-old sister. This morning, having been invited to spend the day with the Chinnappas, we started out after breakfast and half a mile beyond Mill Point turned into one of those narrow onis that seem like paths to some secret paradise as they wind between high red earth embankments, under the shade of mango, peepul, jack-fruit, nellige and palm-trees. When one leaves the motor-road, to approach any of Devangeri’s component villages, there is nothing to indicate that one is living in 1974 instead of 1874.

  We first paid our respects to Jagi’s mother, who speaks no English and has a great sadness behind her eyes; one feels she is still grieving for her husband, who died six years ago when their youngest child was only three. Then Jagi took us to visit four other near-by homesteads, all occupied by her uncles and aunts. As the coffee-picking season has just started only elderly women or very small children were at home and outside every house was spread a carpet of red berries, which must lie for nine or ten days in the sun, to brown before being marketed. Coorg’s main crops dovetail most conveniently, the paddy-threshing ending just when the coffee-picking must begin.

  Coorg hospitality seems not merely a social duty but part of the people’s religion. On each veranda – presided over by innumerable ancestral photographs – we had to partake of coffee, biscuits, savoury scraps with unpronounceable names, papaya knocked from the tree for us, yellow, red and green bananas, supportas, and delicious bull’s-hearts, which look exactly like ox-hearts and have sweet, creamy flesh and many large, flat, shiny black seeds. At the end of all this I wondered where I was supposed to fit an Indian lunch for an honoured guest, but when I saw and smelt the meal my appetite revived. There were two sorts of rice – steamed and fried – curried sardines, salted raw shark, omelette with onion and exotic spices, pickled oranges, dahl, dhosies (delicious rice-flour pancakes) and fried cabbage. Jagi’s mother hovered anxiously while we ate, obviously on tenterhooks lest her efforts proved unpalatable to the guests, and thus I was compelled, by politeness as well as greed, to overeat grossly. I was in a semi-coma as I panted under the midday sun up the steep slope to catch the Virajpet bus – Jagi having arranged (to my secret dismay) that we should spend the afternoon at the cinema.

  The Technicolor Hindi film began in a packed ‘Palas’ at two o’clock. India has one of the four largest film industries in the world and film-going is by far the most popular form of entertainment for her illiterate 70 per cent. This gives film stars great power; in Bombay – the centre of the film industry – they have on occasions significantly influenced election results. They also raise vast sums through public appeals for flood or famine relief and they have even been known to calm hysterical mobs on the brink of violence.

  The three-and-a-half hour film was Rachel’s first experience of the cinema and she enjoyed every moment of it. Afterwards I asked Jagi if India’s long-standing nationwide debate about kissing on the screen has yet been officially resolved: whereupon she blushed most becomingly, and looked with slightly raised eyebrows at her small sister and Rachel, and said ‘No’ in a very end-of-the-discussion voice. So evidently she herself is not one of the ‘progressives’ who favour a change in the law. Some people think it downright hypocritical that in India, where many forms of unnatural vice are graphically depicted in and around places of worship, it is illegal to show an innocent boy-kisses-girl shot on the screen. However, the unsophisticated majo
rity do not find this stylised temple sculpture at all erotic; but as they still think it immodest to sit beside their spouses in a bus they would undoubtedly consider any love-making on the screen offensive. In 1968 the government set up a committee under Mr Justice Khosla to inquire into film censorship, and it recommended that kissing should be allowed on the screen where it could be justified for ‘aesthetic or social reasons’ – whatever these might be. But the traditionalists would not give in and so far the law remains unchanged.

  Jagi had arranged that we should be picked up by a jeep which a cousin of hers is able to borrow – every Coorg cousin has multiple uses – and on the way home we overtook Tim and Sita, being driven to call on the Murphys.

  It was good to see them again and, although they returned only yesterday from Madras, I was vastly amused to discover how much they already knew about our habits and customs. They had been told of all our movements since we settled here, down to the last particular – when we had lunched with whom, how long we stayed, what we ate most of, how far we walk, what times of the day I read and write, where we shop in the bazaar, what we buy, how often I do my dhobi-work, when and how we went to Mercara and who we met there, where my palm-toddy comes from and who has called on us for drinks. What astonishes me is the flawless accuracy of Coorg’s bush-telegraph; despite the widespread nature of the gossip we have provoked, not one detail seems to have been distorted or exaggerated. The only thing Tim had been unable to find out was the exact ingredients of an M.C.C. (Murphy’s Coorg Cocktail). This blend of Arak, honey and fresh lime juice has deservedly (though I say it myself) become famous throughout the area for its agreeable taste and still more agreeable effects, which Tim and I were both enjoying when Sita broke the party up to get back to Green Hills in time for dinner.

  3 February.

  This being Friday, Dr Chengappa arrived at seven-fifteen to make his weekly offering to the ancestors. While brushing my teeth I could hear in the room below his murmured mantras, and the distinctive, muffled thud of a sharp, heavy knife bisecting hairy coconuts – and then the splash of their milk, which is always followed by the dreamy pungency of incense wafting up the stairs.

  The Coorgs’ preoccupation with ancestor-veneration, added to their relative independence of the priestly caste, suggests that their religious beliefs have changed less, since the Vedic period, than those of most other Indians. One of the loveliest passages in the Rig-Veda is an address to the spirit of a dead man, made while his body is burning on the funeral pyre, and even before those marvellous hymns were composed the veneration felt by the Indo-Aryans for their ancestors was an ancient tradition. They already possessed a vast treasury of myths when they entered India some 3,500 years ago – terrifying the people of the Indus Valley, who were far more civilised but had never heard of horse-drawn chariots. And these myths have ever since been interacting with that more cerebral religion of the Brahmans which was probably just beginning to burgeon in the Indus Valley at the time of the earliest Aryan invasions. Some of the results of this fusion are wildly irrational – notably the failure to eliminate ancestor-worship, despite the evolution of the doctrines of karma and samsara, and of a hereditary caste system. Karma is not hereditary: one’s children are not affected by the consequences of one’s deeds in this life; and, according to the doctrine of samsara, a virtuous man can be born into a higher caste in his next life, or a wicked man into a lower caste. Obviously, belief in a heavenly world full of immortal family ghosts cannot be reconciled with samsara by any feat of mental gymnastics – yet for many centuries both beliefs have been held at the same time by millions of Hindus.

  This sort of thing drives logical Western minds to the farthest extremes of intellectual discomfort, while leaving Indians apparently quite comfortable, thank you. And such fundamental ambiguities – which are so acceptable a part of Hindu culture that few Indians ever even notice them – contribute quite a lot to the difficulties of Europeans in India. Too often, the mutual understanding one has been working for, and which seems at last within reach, is suddenly swept out of sight by some unexpected, inexplicable eddy that has whirled to the surface of the Indian mind.

  14

  Forest Funeral

  28 January.

  Today’s social activities took us outside the Coorg community to lunch with a young couple who live about six miles away and spent an evening here last week sampling M.C.C. The husband – a scientist – studied abroad for eight years and belongs to a rich, fairly orthodox Hindu family from another part of South India, but the wife is a European. When first we met, on the street in Virajpet, she said to me by way of greeting, ‘I hate India!’ And looking that day at her husband’s strained little smile my heart sank, as a whole familiar situation – which never seems any the less tragic for being familiar – was revealed. Against a European background we have handsome, brilliant Indian boy meeting impressionable, naïve European girl whose ignorance of India is complete. They marry in Europe, and perhaps have their first child there, and then return to India where the dashing, exotic Indian bridegroom is reabsorbed into his family and becomes the peremptory Hindu husband. For most such wives, who may be many miles from their nearest fellow-European and have had no adequate preparation before the transplant to India, it is almost impossible to adjust to this country.

  Let us call them Ram and Mary. They live in an amply staffed, very comfortable Coorg-built house which Mary thinks no better than a neolithic dwelling because it lacks electricity. Their two sons, aged three and five, are healthy and attractive: but Mary has her own ideas about child-rearing and these, naturally, do not coincide with Ram’s. However, when we first spent an evening together at Green Hills, and again when they came to Devangeri last week, they gave a passable imitation of an affectionate young married couple, Western style. It was only today, seeing them in their own home, that I realised how delicately balanced such relationships are – how permanently in danger of being pushed, by a word or a glance, into some lonely chasm of misunderstanding.

  Ram is extremely intelligent – already a name to be reckoned with in his own profession – and he is also a dedicated humanist, an outspoken opponent of traditional Hinduism in all its manifestations and an especially fervent crusader against priestly superstition. Yet on the domestic scene he reverts to type in an almost eerie way – one feels he has been taken over by forces too strong for him – and then he orders Mary around as though she were a not very bright child, showing her none of the normal courtesies Western women expect. He is, however, genuinely kind, and I suspect this behaviour may be in part a reaction to Mary’s having as her birthright that freedom which he, as a liberal, agnostic young scientist, could have voluntarily conferred on a Hindu girl. He would probably have found it easier to live up to his ideals with a wife of his own kind – a well-educated, intelligent young Hindu whom he could have permitted to lead a liberated life without her ever becoming that challenge to his masculine authority which a European woman inevitably is. Mary is far less intelligent than Ram, but that does not prevent her from voicing strong personal opinions and the situation must be considerably exacerbated by her fatuous criticisms of Indian civilisation.

  29 January.

  Having Rachel here gives me a close-up view of the profound differences between Indian and Western child-rearing methods; and this in turn helps me to sympathise more easily with people like Ram. Many Indians from orthodox backgrounds who try to grow beyond the static forms of Hinduism find themselves thwarted by childhood attitudes and ideas which have become so firmly entwined with the fibres of their personality that they can never be completely discarded.

  This afternoon a neighbour called to present us with a huge basket of plantains, and Rachel, as is her wont, rushed to show him the picture of a crocodile she had just completed. He laughed indulgently and said, ‘But crocodiles don’t really have such big teeth. And its legs are too long. And the colour is all wrong. Come – lend me your crayons and I’ll show you how to draw a crocodi
le properly.’

  Rachel’s chin trembled. ‘But that’s the way I imagine a crocodile’, she said unhappily. ‘That’s what he looks like in my mind, when I think about him.’ And later, after our friend’s departure, she asked me plaintively, ‘Why do the Indians never like my paintings? You said you liked the crocodile. Don’t they know I’m only five?’

  I tried to explain that in this area Europeans and Indians have very different ideas. When Indian children attempt to exercise an adult skill their efforts are rarely judged as those of small children. Instead, they are irrationally expected to perform up to adult standards and are given no praise simply for trying. Their drawing or painting or modelling are seen not as forms of creative play but as failures. No doubt this comes of belonging to a society where economic necessity compels most children to perfect adult skills as soon as possible; but, whatever its cause, it has the indisputable effect of delaying development, withering self-confidence and severely discouraging the experimental, exploratory instinct. A child is unlikely to attempt some new achievement if he knows that failure will be derided and success only acknowledged if it is complete. Amidst a group of European 5-year-olds Rachel seems a child of average intelligence: amidst a group of Indian 5-year-olds she seems brilliant.

  Rachel had just gone to bed this evening when the Chengappas called – father, mother and younger daugher. Mrs Chengappa, too, is a doctor, and yet another of those youthful-looking Coorg mothers with grown-up families who impress one equally by their brains, beauty, poise, humour and sheer strength of character. But she, especially, recalls one of my grandmother’s favourite phrases, which I have not heard used for years: ‘There is a woman of great presence’.

  Halfway through his M.C.C., Dr Chengappa himself brought up the subject of the local Harijans so I felt free to ask why they have such an aversion to attending school. Since Independence the Indian Government has done everything possible to improve the lot of the ‘Scheduled Castes’ and Harijan children are issued free uniforms and books, and even hockey sticks, to entice them to school. In some areas both teachers and caste-Hindu parents are strongly opposed to Harijans attending government schools, but I know this is not the case here for I have several times seen teachers trying to convince Harijan parents of the benefits of education.