On a Shoestring to Coorg

by Dervla Murphy

  During the meal we discussed the problems of recruiting well-educated Indian girls to the nursing profession, which because of pollution complications is still regarded as fit only for the lowest caste. Mrs Chengappa explained that until living conditions for the student nurses are improved there is little hope of the situation changing. The younger Chengappa daughter’s ambition to be a nurse is supported in theory by her parents; but in practice they feel bound to discourage it because student nurses are not allowed to rent flats and conditions in the hospital hostels would prove intolerable for such a girl. Yet nursing will only become socially acceptable after a pioneering corps of high-caste girls has led the way, so here India has yet another vicious circle.

  25 February.

  On the third of March we leave Coorg for North India, so we have only six more nights in Devangeri. Coincidentally, on our last evening a torchlight display of Coorg folk-dancing is being staged on the maidan here, as part of the annual Mercara-Darien (Connecticut) get-together, and those jollifications may perhaps lighten that gloom which has already settled on me at the thought of leaving Devangeri. We have been invited to spend the night of the second at the Machiahs, and next morning we catch the Bangalore bus.

  Now the midday hours are noticeably hotter – though never uncomfortable, as there is an increasing amount of cloud and breeze. Soon the heavy ‘blossom showers’ of March will come; how I wish we could have stayed to see the plantations being transformed into white oceans of heavily scented blossom, and the grey-brown maidans turning green! These March showers are vitally important for next year’s coffee; if they are inadequate the crop is ruined, however good the later monsoon rains may be. And it is not always easy to get the ripe berries harvested before the showers, which would destroy them, so during the past week we have observed tremendous activity in the plantations.

  Rachel had just gone to sleep this evening when an unfamiliar car appeared in the compound and I saw emerging from it one of our Virajpet merchant friends, coming with his wife and two small sons to say good-bye and present us with farewell gifts of sandalwood and expensive Cadbury’s chocolate. Mr Kusum’s father wrote a history of Coorg in Kannada, and in addition to his flourishing general store in Virajpet he owns a printing press in Mercara and is therefore, by Indian reckoning, a publisher.

  When I first asked Mr Kusum, ‘To which community do you belong?’ he proudly replied, ‘I am of Indira Gandhi’s community – a Kashmiri Brahman.’ But the family moved from Goa to Coorg eighty years ago and it is many generations since they left Kashmir. They remain, however, strict vegetarians, teetotallers and non-smokers – not easy people to entertain chez Murphy.

  Mr Kusum’s account of the status of Indian authors made my hair stand on end. He assured me that an author can hope to make no more than fifteen or twenty pounds sterling on a book that sells 2,000 or 3,000 copies. Moreover, reviewers are paid nothing by the newspapers – the free review copy is their fee – and are therefore open to bribes from authors or the enemies of authors. Probably – added Mr Kusum – the enemies, because by the time the author has paid for the printing of his book, and the paper on which it is printed, he is unlikely to be able to afford a bribe. My professional blood ran cold as the Indian literary scene was thus revealed in all its ghastly detail. No wonder Indians are incredulous when their persistent questioning reveals that I am, (a) a writer and, (b) not given a grant to travel by the Irish Government, a university, a business firm or anyone else. They simply cannot imagine a lowly writer being able to afford to travel abroad.

  26 February.

  At last week’s wedding the Good Shepherd nuns who were our fellow-guests invited us to their Ammathi school to meet its ancient English founder. This school has over 300 pupils, between the ages of four and thirteen, and it was built and is being run without the government support that was hoped for – which lack of support is interpreted by some as a symptom of official anti-Christian bias. However, the Good Shepherd Order is extremely wealthy in India, where it has been established for over 130 years, and the Coorg families for whom the school caters are well able to pay high fees. The tiny minority of non-fee-paying pupils are ‘deserving cases’ from poor Ammathi families and are presumably admitted as a token gesture, since the Order was founded not to educate the rich but to tend the poor – and especially to reclaim the souls of unmarried mothers and prostitutes.

  After touring the well-equipped classrooms I was taken to meet Mother Christine, the 79-year-old English woman who founded the school. Sixty years ago she became a Roman Catholic, to the horror of her peppery old colonel father, and a year later she joined the Good Shepherd Order in Bangalore. Her forefathers had been soldiers in India for almost two centuries and I enjoyed her account of coming to Ammathi at 70 years old, with only one 73-year-old companion, and briskly building a new school of which the local Indian authorities did not really approve. It is beautifully ironical that this archaic flare-up of British Imperialism was in a cause which Mother Christine’s forbears would have abhorred.

  By any standards Mother Christine is a memorable personality: a tiny wisp of a woman, hardly up to my shoulder, but still vibrant with energy, intelligence, good humour and determination – and having, at the core of all this, great gentleness, sympathy and wisdom. As we sat drinking endless cups of tea, in a small, sunlit, freshly painted parlour, I again became aware of the difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary attitudes to non-Christians. In theory the Roman Catholic church is one of the most inflexible: in practice the majority of its representatives are conspicuously tolerant and considerate in their relationships with non-Christians.

  At noon, when we stood up to leave Mother Christine, she accompanied us on to the balcony, looked at the children erupting from their classrooms and suddenly exclaimed, ‘I love India!’ Then she turned to me and said, ‘Perhaps the hippies are right – perhaps in the future mankind’s spiritual salvation will flow from here. Have you ever thought that this is the most prayerful country in the world?’

  27 February.

  In the forest near Jagi’s village is an ancient temple to which, for certain festivals, pilgrims come from all over South-West India. I find its special character most attractive; so discreetly does it merge into the landscape that one could walk by without noticing it, but for a massive black Nandi facing the entrance. The oblong structure is crudely built of dark grey stone blocks, unskilfully dressed, and the façade has only a few clumsy carvings of mythological figures, almost erased by time. Such a temple could well be 1,000 years old, or more; no one has the least idea when it was erected, though all agree that it is of extraordinary antiquity. The door is kept locked and only the local Brahman priest, who lives near by, may actually enter the shrine, but yesterday Jagi suggested that I should attend this morning’s puja and then have a farewell breakfast at her house; she added that I would most likely find myself alone with the Brahman, Coorg villagers not being great temple-goers.

  We set out early this morning, before the sun had lifted the night mist from the face of Coorg, and walked enchanted through a world all silver and green and filled with bird song – until suddenly, as we approached Jagi’s house, a warm golden light came sliding through the trees to catch the richly blooming poinsettias that line this oni.

  I left Rachel with Jagi and continued alone, removing my shoes at the little opening in the low stone wall around the grassy temple compound. As the priest had not yet arrived, Nandi and I were on our own in the shade of giant nellige, peepul, jack-fruit, mango and palm-trees. The sky above those lofty, mingling branches was a clear, fresh, morning blue, criss-crossed by the emerald flashes of parakeets, and the peace of that place was immense.

  Then the Brahman appeared: a tall, thin, stooping elderly man, wearing only a lunghi and a forbidding expression. Probably he disapproves of mlecchas within the temple compound – but this, I must stress, is sheer conjecture. Nothing was said or done to make me feel unwelcome. Indeed, so completely wa
s I ignored that at the end of an hour I had begun to doubt the reality of my own existence. Yet I could sympathise with his attitude: in a remote, impersonal way I even found him congenial. Plainly he was a devout man of the gods.

  Amidst the hubbub of a big temple, or even of a small temple in a town, all is bewilderment and confusion for the uninitiated, and one cannot quite grasp what is going on. But this morning, alone with the Brahman in the stillness of the forest, I could observe every detail from the moment the sacrificial fire was roused in the little stone hut beside the temple. As I stood by the open door, watching the small flames jumping and lengthening in the half-darkness, I saw them – not too fancifully – as links with the garhapatya fires of the earliest Aryans in India, who had no temples or holy precincts of any kind but lit their sacred fires on some level grassy spot and worshipped joyously under the sky.

  All the time murmuring Sanskrit verses – for in the beginning was the Word – the priest took his brass pitcher to the well near Nandi, and fetched water in which to cook his sacrificial rice. While it was simmering he stripped a coconut, half-peeled a few plantains, prepared his camphor dish-lamp and incense-burner, strung a few aromatic garlands of forest flowers, and ground antimony between two stones to make a red paste – symbol of happiness – with which to anoint Shiva, Ganesh, Nandi and the lingam stone that stands under a sacred tree behind the temple.

  When he approached the hut door with his laden brass tray I stepped aside, and then followed him to the temple door, which he had opened on his way to the well. Two ancient images loomed within, close to the entrance – the four-armed Shiva, dancing on the prostrate body of the demon of delusion, and Rachel’s beloved elephant-headed, pot-bellied Ganesh, who is Shiva’s son by his consort Parvati, the mountain goddess. Standing at the foot of the half-dozen worn stone steps that led up to the shrine, I was hardly six feet away from the Brahman as he sat cross-legged before his gods and began to perform those rituals that already were old when Christ was born.

  Occasionally, in India, the sheer weight of tradition overwhelms and our Western concept of time becomes meaningless – a disturbing and yet exhilarating experience, offering a glimpse of possibilities discounted by logic and modern science, but not by the immemorial intuitions of mankind. And so it was this morning, as I watched the Brahman making his oblations, ringing his bell, wafting incense, presenting garlands, cupping his hands over the flame of the dish-lamp and gravely reciting Sanskrit formulas the exact words of which he may or may not have understood.

  I despair of conveying, to those who have never seen it, the eloquent gracefulness of a Hindu priest’s hand-movements as he worships. All his oblations and recitations are accompanied by these intricate, stylised, flowing gestures which symbolically unite him to the object of his worship and are of surpassing beauty. At the end of this morning’s puja, as the Brahman withdrew from the temple – moving past the mleccha with downcast eyes – I could not at once emerge from the state of exaltation into which he had unwittingly drawn me.

  2 March.

  The Ayyappas had nobly offered to entertain Rachel today, while I got on with sorting and packing and cleaning, but early in the afternoon I heard at the foot of the ladder that choked kind of sobbing which means a child is deeply upset. During a romp with her Harijan friends she had fallen on to a pile of broken stones off a five-foot wall and she is lucky only to have minor cuts on her left upper arm and what looks like a badly sprained right wrist. When I had washed her cuts and read three chapters of Alice as an anaesthetic she said chirpily, ‘Aunty Ayyappa has asked us both to tea so I think we’d better go now’. Which we did, and she skipped ahead of me like a spring lamb. But by the time Dr Chengappa and his family arrived at six o’clock, to supervise the final arrangements for the dance display, her right forearm was perceptibly swollen and the doctor said she should wear a sling.

  By sunset all Devangeri had assembled on the maidan. A row of chairs stood ready for the dozen or so Darien guests, who were being driven down from Mercara, and Tim beckoned me to sit beside him; predictably, he is President of the Mercara-Darien Association. He told me that Devangeri is among the few villages in which women’s dancing is being revived. During the pre-Lingayat era Coorg women participated in all community events, dancing at village festivals and joining their menfolk in those lengthy songs which form an important part of the ceremonies at funerals, weddings and Huthri celebrations.

  In the centre of the maidan stood the Kuthimbolicha – a tall brass pedestal lamp, around which the dancers circle – and by seven-fifteen the guests had arrived, the lamp had been lit and Rachel was well established on the lap of the most famous of all Coorgs, General K. M. Cariappa, retired Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army. Clearly they had fallen in love at first sight, which then astonished me; later I discovered that the General is famous on three continents as a child-magnet.

  There were three groups of dancers and the programme was opened by a score of slim, shy, graceful schoolgirls who performed with great assurance and skill. Next came the women, who have several times been invited to participate in New Delhi’s annual Republic Day celebrations. They dance to the music of a cymbal, chanting gravely as they circle around the flaring lamp – bending, swaying, twisting – and rhythmically they raise and lower their arms while their ornaments tinkle and flash and their silken saris ripple in the torchlight like cascades of colour.

  Then appeared the turbanned, barefooted men in their immaculate Kupyas, each armed with his shining sword, ready to dance the renowned and exhausting Balakata – a Coorg war-dance of incalculable antiquity. I was stirred to the depths by these handsome sons of warriors who invoked the war gods while running and pirouetting and flourishing their swords as though about to behead the next man. As the dance progressed everyone became increasingly caught up in the emotion it generated and the circle whirled faster and faster, while swords were flourished more and more boldly, and the dust rose from proudly stamping feet, and dark eyes gleamed beneath gilded turbans. Then the excitement spread and, with typical Coorg spontaneity, many of the crowd surged on to the maidan to give their own performances – including General Cariappa and Rachel, who went stamping and leaping through clouds of dust, hand in hand, beaming at each other and waving gaily in response to the cheers of the delighted crowd. I shall not quickly forget the tall, slim, military figure of the General, contrasting with the small, sturdy, sun-tanned figure of my daughter as they cavorted improbably together by the light of mighty plantain-stump torches – held high, with rosy sparks streaming off them in the night breeze, by a dozen laughing youths on the periphery of the crowd.

  An hour later, as we walked with the Machiahs through the silver and black silence of a brilliantly moonlit forest, we could hear behind us the chanting, cheering and cymbal-clashing of the Devangeri villagers who had settled down to an impromptu dancing session that was unlikely to end before dawn.

  Epilogue

  Our train journey from Bangalore to Delhi took forty-nine hours. Luckily, however, a kind attendant – who never looked for a tip, much less a bribe – went to a lot of trouble and was eventually able to provide us with sleeping-berths. (These were narrow slatted wooden shelves and during the heat of the day they were too close to the roof for comfort; but we both had good nights.) Only when travelling by rail is it an unqualified advantage to be a woman in India; the third-class ladies’ coaches are usually less crowded and filthy than the rest, although men accompanying women relatives also use them.

  We changed trains at Madras, where I had only forty minutes to find our reserved seats. The anxiously hurrying crowds were so dense I had to use force to make progress and Rachel understandably found the scene a little frightening. As she was in some danger of being injured by the mob I bundled her into a convenient ladies’ coach and left her guarding our kit, sitting beside an amiable European nun for company. Then I resumed my search, but because of the startling metamorphosis that had overtaken the name MURPHY at the pen of
some railway clerk it was too late to move Rachel by the time I had found the right coach.

  The nun was an Italian who had spent twenty years in India as a medical missionary. She mentioned that she now practises as a gynaecologist in Kerala and this reminded me of a name given me in London by Jill Buxton, before we left for Bombay.

  ‘Do you know a Sister Dr Alberoni?’ I asked. ‘She works in the Nirmala Hospital near Caldicot.’

  The nun looked at me strangely for a moment and then said – ‘I am Sister Alberoni!’

  One long, unbroken rail journey is an almost essential ingredient of travel in India, for it enables the traveller to feel that country’s vastness. North of Madras city we passed through mile after endless mile of flat, desiccated, unpeopled landscape, where one remembered that India is not at all overpopulated in relation to her area. The earth was cracked and grey and worn, and the grey-brown, dusty, ragged leaves, dangling from stunted trees in the still heat, looked like the grey-brown, dusty, ragged garments of the peasants who crowded every station, staring impassively at the train. Although many outsiders, including myself, may romanticise about the beautiful simplicity of life in rural India, there is nothing either beautiful or simple about life as it is now lived by the majority in Maharashtra, Gujerat, U.P. or Bihar.

  The very poor are rarely met on a train, for obvious reasons – though my ticket from Bangalore to Delhi cost only Rs.62 – but near Wardha one conscience-smiting family did get aboard for a few hours. It consisted of a mother and five small children and they had their lunch wrapped in a leaf: two thin chapattis and a little chilli sauce at the bottom of a tin mug. They sat opposite us in a row, like an Oxfam advertisement, and when the two chapattis had been divided between six each had only two or three mouthfuls. It was plain that never in their lives had they eaten a full meal and this is the fate of hundreds of millions of Indians – the grim reality which we had evaded in Coorg. When I handed a banana to each of them they stared at me for a moment with a dreadful incomprehension, then hastily peeled the fruit and stuffed it into their mouths as though afraid I might change my mind and take it back. There was no attempt at a smile or nod of thanks; these people are so unused even to the minimal generosity involved that they received it with incredulity rather than gratitude.