Tales of South India

Meanwhile, in a Small Sliver of South India...

Last evening, my husband and I were at the Asia Society in New York, to attend a reading and performance by William Dalrymple and Vidya Shah and her orchestra. This event was arranged in conjunction with the Society’s current exhibit on Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857. The evening was, for the most part, interesting and entertaining. Dalrymple’s narrative, drawn largely from his book, The Last Mughal, was studded with entertaining anecdotes that brought his characters to life. Vidya Shah complemented and supplemented his stories with songs and poetry from the great and little-known poets and songsters of that era.

The Highway Poet

Somewhere down the serpentine labyrinth that is the organization chart of the National Highways Authority of India is a little box that is an offshoot of the Department of Highway Safety. This box is the proud bearer of the title “Couplets and Proverbs Division (L&T K-W)”. It has a single employee, a long-haired, dreamy-eyed, thickly bespectacled youth, the nephew of the Chairman of the Department of Highway Safety (S-India). This young lad, who had been a gentle, sweet-natured child, the kind parents pointed out to their boisterous offspring as a shining example of what they ought to be like, created a major commotion in his family when he declared that he wanted to study Literature in college. He displayed a firmness and refusal to budge from his position that were in complete contrast to the gentle, pliant nature of his early years. His family, peopled thus far exclusively with engineers and doctors, were just recovering from the shock of the renegade’s announcement when he sent them reeling afresh with a further declaration that it was his intention to become a Poet. He would kill himself, he threatened, if anybody tried to prevent him from achieving his goal.

A Tree in the Forest

I visit Madras from New York several times a year, to meet family, to reclaim my Indianness, to realign an off-kilter inner compass. While some things take more adjusting to than others, driving a car is not among them. I slip seamlessly from driving on the right side of the road to driving on the left side, from diligently following road signs and signals to regarding them as mere helpful suggestions, from dodging a crazed Chinese food delivery bicyclist pedalling maniacally in the wrong direction against a stream of outraged New Yorkers driving maniacally in the other direction to squeezing past a wall of sputtering auto-rickshaws  and rumbling buses and the assorted animals and birds who share the road with the craziest variety of vehicles I have seen.

The Poetic Landscapes of Tamil Nadu

Covering an area of over 130,000 square kilometers, India’s southern-most state has a variety of landscapes, terrains and habitats. There are beautiful, wave-lapped golden beaches and emerald green paddy fields; lush tropical forests and cool mountain ranges. There is a staggering variety of flowers, trees, birds, mammals, marine life, insects and reptiles, a nature-made counterpoint to the cultural and historical riches of the state. It is mineral-rich, with abundant reserves of lignite, quartz, feldspar, bauxite, limestone, graphite and granite. 

A Few Thousand Words

For Kanchipuram, City of a Thousand Temples.

Kailasanathar Temple

Flanked by its belt of defensive jungles is that city
Whose doors are never closed to those who seek the prize
Lovely like the pericarp of the many-petalled lotus
The navel of the dark-hued Lord.....

(From the Sangam poem Perumbanatruppadai, translated by N. Raghunathan)

Nurturing Nature

The state of Tamil Nadu rolls gently and smoothly south-westwards from Madras to Coimbatore. The terrain is mostly flat, save the occasional hills that rise and fall like soft sighs. The scenery is vintage South India: emerald green paddy fields, lush groves of banana and coconut, clumps of tall, dust-kissed trees. It is a landscape of timeless beauty, soothing and serene, and of all the beautiful places in the world, it is this that ignites a spark deep in my heart, that whispers to me, you are home.

From Court to Concert Hall: The Evolution of Carnatic Music Performance

Now the rich stream of Music winds along,
Deep, majestic, smooth and strong,
Now rolling down the steep amain,
Headlong, impetuous, see it pour;
The rocks and nodding groves re-bellow to the roar.
Thomas Gray, The Progress of Poesy

It is a well known fact that humans have a tendency to view the past through rose-tinted lenses. It is also well known that we dislike most change and are convinced that anything new, anything that is a radical departure from a tried-and-tested way of doing things, has to be treated with suspicion and derision. This is no less the case with Carnatic music, where we have convinced ourselves that its history and evolution from the days of the Sama Veda was one long, glorious golden period of old-fashioned courtesy and graciousness in which its composers and practitioners had but the noblest of intents, were motivated by the highest spiritual values, cared for nothing but the purest musical ideals. Thoughts of money - that crass, degrading, immoral commodity- never entered their minds. And then, alas, this ideal state of affairs crumbled to an ignominious end with the winds of change that gathered force and struck at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Infinite Beauty

On the last Tuesday of January 1913, on a clear, cold winter’s morning in Cambridge University in England, a 35 year old mathematician of rapidly growing fame and esteem opened a letter. The letter, thick and unwieldy, bore the grime and wear-and-tear of a long journey, and a ragged line of stamps, unfamiliar and exotic. It started with the words, “Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum............”

Love Thy Neighbor

When you have been involved with something for most of your life, you come to recognize this: the longer the relationship, the more things there are that you realize you do not know. And also: you can meet some people every day, for years on end, share laughter, tears and memories with them, live right next door to them, but there are aspects and areas of their lives that remain complete mysteries to you, lived behind doors that only a select few people have the keys to. Let me explain.

The Street Wall Journal

For as long as I can remember, the walls abutting the streets of my beloved Madras have been a canvas, a battleground, for all manner of posters, paintings and graffiti. Depending on my inclination and mood for the moment, I viewed those walls as riotously colorful, madly imaginative,often hilarious representations of the city's political and entertainment landscape, or as messy, garish, tasteless eyesores that defaced every inch of blank wall space. One look at those walls, and you got an instant picture - literally - of who was in power, and who was vying for it, with political party members and supporters falling over themselves to outdo one another in their fawning, often ridiculous depictions of their political leaders. Come election time, the poster madness rose to a fever-pitched frenzy, and they were often the only means by which many of the city's residents were made aware of who the candidates were, and what party they represented. Movie stars, gods and goddesses, mythological demons and revered, long-dead heroes of yore, all made their appearance on the walls of Madras, taking these already larger-than-life candidates into the glorified realms of the divine, the super-hero and the noble, or the vile, despicable and beastly. In America, television is the primary medium for election campaigning. In Madras, it was the walls.

A Junkie and a Monkey

Here is the Ramayana on drugs. It is a far cry from the black and white world of the evil Ravana and the squeaky-clean Rama, the pious Sita and loyal Hanuman. A Ramayana where a lustful Ravana, burned out on angel dust, kidnaps Sita, his mind clouded over by passion and desire. Where Rama and Lakshmana, wandering, frustrated and helpless up and down India looking for Sita, dull their pain with endless joints and pipes. And then Hanuman enters the story, a "hardcore ex-con tattooed" Hanuman who rallies his drugged-out monkey army with a big, happy substance abuse recovery-house reunion. What follows is a war - of monkeys and junkies, everybody high, everybody in a fog, in a fuddle, on cocaine, on LSD, a tangled disarray of tarnished minds and bodies. A war of relapsed junkies, and only Hanuman has the cure: the Sanjeevani herb.

The Lady of Many Smiles

When I was twelve years old, I came home from school one day and got the shock of my life. While getting out of the car, I saw, sitting on the veranda next to my mother, a white-clad lady who was grinning at me. That grin stopped me in my tracks. It was the sort of grin that might haunt you in a nightmare, a wolfish leer, a flash of over-sized, protruding teeth, sinister and chilling. A shiver ran down my spine.And then, as I stepped closer and saw who it was, I relaxed, and both of us started laughing. We laughed till tears ran down our cheeks, as we clutched at our sides and gasped for air. She cocked an eyebrow in inquiry, and I shook my head emphatically, no. 

Tales of the Seven Pagodas

Legions of giggling schoolchildren, high-spirited college students, trysting lovers, coy honeymooners, and tourists, both frivolous and serious, have traveled the 60 odd kilometers from Madras to Mamallapuram. I have made the trek, too, several times, in all these capacities, the first over four decades ago.

The Abode of the Virgin Goddess

The Call of the South: Part Three: Kanyakumari

 It is impossible to write a simple and straightforward account of anything in India. Say you want to write about a place. You start gathering your information, your memories, your thoughts. And you find you have stepped into Looking Glass Land, a mare’s nest of goddesses, demons and kings, ancient travelers, age-old feuds and modern politicians. The strangest of bedfellows clamor for your attention, and you cannot afford to ignore or dismiss any of them. You have mythology rubbing shoulders with history.  You have to consider politics, religion, culture, science and economics, each with its attendant brood of issues and points of contention. The past and the present are inseparably intertwined. You step back and view this lively patchwork, this teeming tapestry. And you say, wow.

The Call of the South - Part Two

National Highway 47 and Suchindram

The distance from Trivandrum to the temple town of Suchindram on the promisingly named National Highway 47 is barely 50 miles. This is the deep south of India. The land of gently swaying coconut palms and emerald green paddy fields, red earth and sea-misted air. 

The Call of the South

Part One: Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Trivandrum

How quickly one goes from complaining about the cold to complaining about the heat! It had been barely a few dozen hours earlier that we had moaned about the New York winter, unfolding with cruel frigidity and stretching endlessly ahead while our eyes gazed blearily at the bleak, wind-whipped, snow-swept landscape all around, draped in monotones of white, gray and brown.

The Science of the Kolam

 

 

Let me begin with a doff of the hat to the Math and Science Gene (MSG). He has marched tirelessly through countless generations of my family, far, far back into the cobwebbed recesses of ancestral lore and memory. He has worked hard, ceaselessly, relentlessly, without ever skipping a single progeny of my clan. To be sure, there were some dangerously close brushes with the Lunatic Gene (LG) (known in polite circles as the Quirky Gene), but the MSG always prevailed, always managed to nudge the LG, that over-ambitious and irreverent upstart, aside. In a daring attempt at a coup, the Slothful Gene once ventured to sabotage an entire sub-branch of my family, but the MSG pulled them out of that potential morass, that almost-blight on the family name, by sheer force of will.

Weaving a Tale: Of Istria and South India

Indulge me for a little while as I lay out for you a few threads of history. They will seem to have nothing to do with one another – for how can it be possible that little-known Istria, and the glamorous and lovely Venice, and ruthlessly cold-blooded Dalmatian pirates, and just-as-equally ruthless and cold-blooded merchants, and pepper, cloves, ginger and cinnamon, and South India, be connected in any way? Restrain your impatience, hold your sharp comments, and allow me to assure you that they are, as I pick up the threads and weave my story. I have to confess that since my own knowledge of the facts is a bit shaky I will avoid too many details which might maroon me in treacherous waters, and merely skim the surface to present to you – tada!! – the Istria-South India connection, as a preamble to my account of my time in Istria - Groznjan in particular - which will follow.

The Journey of Bharata Natyam

 

 
Nataraja, Musee Guimet,  Paris

Many, many years ago, in a world filled with bitterness, greed, jealousy and ugliness, the people of the earth yearned for something beautiful and enchanting, a thing of grace and wonder that would cut through the gloom and chaos and light up their world. In despair, they approached Brahma the Supreme Creator and begged him to create something that all the people could enjoy with all their senses, and that would take their minds off the wretchedness and misery of their lives.

On a Hot Day in August

A promise: this will be a brief (and hopefully painless) lesson in history. For those of you whose hearts start racing (for all the wrong reasons) and whose mouths go dry and who convulse in horror at the mere mention of history - don't worry, I understand. Memories of unendurably boring history classes are seared into my brain, to remain unerased by time or age. In school, our history "lesson" consisted of the teacher reading out, verbatim, as many pages from the history text book as she could cram into the lesson. For an entire hour, we were subjected to her low drone, completely devoid of any tonal variation. Those of us (which, on most days, was most of our small class of 12) who attempted to relieve the dreary tedium of the "lesson" by talking to our neighbors or falling asleep were made to stand on our desks for the remainder of the period. Perhaps you have similar memories of history class. So, if you fear that a short, heavily diluted (and very likely inaccurate) history lesson might do irreparable harm to your psyche, go ahead and scroll down to the pictures. I won't feel hurt.

(For a wonderful personal memoir and history of Madras, go here )

On a hot day in August (possibly July) 1639, Francis Day, an ambitious and industrious (and, some gossipy tongues maintain, a womanizing, alcoholic, gambling-addicted) employee of the English East India Company, set off on a voyage down the Coromandel Coast of India in search of a suitable piece of land for a textile factory. He went with the blessings and high hopes of his boss, Andrew Cogan, who was the Chief of the Machilipatnam factory.

A Matter of Taste

"Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness": Pablo Picasso

The town of Suchindram is in the far south of Tamil Nadu, a mere blink of an eye from Kanyakumari, the Land’s End of India. It is a morning’s (or afternoon’s) drive from Kerala’s capital, Trivandrum, past the chaotic jumble of its outskirts, through dusty, potholed roads and bustling villages and sudden glimpses of a landscape of breathtaking beauty. All around Suchindram is the South India of one’s dreams: dense banana groves, swaying coconut trees, paddy fields ploughed by sloe-eyed oxen, the fertile land a glossy, emerald green as far as the eye can see.