The day was already hot when the train emerged from the dark canopy of Egmore into the blinding sunlight and rumbled slowly out through the suburbs. Over the Coum canal and the Adyar river, and past St Thomas Mount. The rains had not yet come, and the air was stifling despite the overhead fans in the carriage. In between gardens of coco palms, new buildings were sprouting everywhere. Further on, the lakes at Chingleput looked magnificent: a shimmering expanse covered with birds. A big kite wheeled and fell put of the sun to take a fish from the water. The crystalline blue water reflected the fringe of rocky red hills and the pointed spire of Tirukalikundran, where it would soon be lunchtime for the eagles.
I had a conversation with an advocate from Gwalior, on the way to Pondi with his wife, who was also an advocate. He wore traditional clothes, a white kurta, tilak mark on his forehead, tiffin box by his side.
‘Don’t be idealistic about India; 95 per cent of people here don’t believe in God either! Open your papers any day: how many women are brutalized, even burned, by their husbands’ families. It is another view of India from the bench of the law, my dear fellow. But all is changing: there is TV and video, even in the villages now. This will inevitably advance the cause of democracy. Change is always, but it is more rapid now, and ideas are the motor of change. Now – or soon – all will have acess to them. Look, not so long ago as a Brahmin I would have been outcast for travelling abroad, as we have done; we would have lost our Brahminical purity. Few adhere to such outdated taboos now. Even mixing with you foreigners was not so long ago impossible.’
His wife shifted the tiffin box to her side and began to spread out lunch. ‘Now, would you like to share our jaggery rice?’
In fact I had already placed my lunch order. They have a great system on the southern railways: after Chingleput a boy comes round with little coffee flasks and takes your order, which they telegraph down the line from Tindivanam. When the train arrives at Villapuram Junction, usually around 1.30, the chap with the catering concession races across the platform with his kitchen assistants, holding towers of teetering metal lunch plates like circus jugglers. Vegetarian or ‘non-veg’ dishes – sambhar, dhal, curried vegetables, juniper berries, curd, pickle, a twist of salt – these you consume at your seat in the fifteen-minute stop at Villapuram. It is a simple and usually foolproof system, but today there had been a snag: after all the meals had been served, there was no food for me or a man across the aisle. The chap in the seat behind immediately insisted I take his: ‘You are our guest in our country. Besides my wife has brought us a picnic already.’
He lifted the cloth from their basket to reveal a pre-prepared feast, including chicken legs. ‘We are non-veg, you see. We ordered extra vegetables just in case.’
When we set off again, the kitchen manager was still arguing with the one irate passenger who had missed out. As the train pulled into Cuddalore the concessionaire was still scratching his head as his figures failed to add up one more time. Around him a mountain of used plates stood by the door ready for the journey back to his kitchen at Villapuram.
Through the drowsy heat of the afternoon we travelled slowly down the coastal plain, rumbling over long bridges across the dried-up courses of rivers where only the odd green pond was left in immense tracts of wind-blown sand and camel thorn. In places the sandbanks were covered with brightly coloured clothes, sari cloths and bedspreads where the dhobis had found enough water to do their washing. I kicked off my shoes and spread the map out on the seat.
This plain is the heartland of Tamil civilization. It is framed by the sea, the long chain of mountains and the high plateau of central India: the Deccan, an ancient fissured red land, arid and austere, burned by the sun for ten months of the year. Here in the southeastern corner of the subcontinent is a fertile flatland cut by the rivers Pennar, Vellar, Vaigai and above all the sacred Cavery: these rivers made the civilization.
The southland – Ten Nadu as the Tamils call it – is different from the north in culture and language. The dark-skinned southerner going to Delhi feels himself to be in a foreign culture, and may even find himself subject to racial jokes and stereotypes.
‘It’s a foreign land to us up there,’ said the dapper young Tamil man whose family were sitting across the aisle. ‘I am working in Indore, inland from Bombay. It is really another world for a Tamil; without English I would be lost there.’ His two little daughters spoke and wrote Hindi, and were already losing their Tamil.
‘The English language has helped give unity to India. I could not work up north without it as I don’t speak Hindi.’ He’s working for a Japanese multinational tractor company. They are going back for a holiday to his home town, Kumbakonum, a lovely place on the Cavery river.
‘My dad was a schoolteacher there; he’s a traditional Tamil, you know, he still wears his dhoti and goes to the temple every day. I did an engineering degree; I escaped from that small world.’
Exactly when the Tamils came into the south is a difficult question. They like to describe themselves as the original Indians. But the tribal peoples and aboriginals who still inhabit the forests of the Deccan and the Nilgiris obviously preceded them. The Tamils themselves are first mentioned in the inscriptions of the northern emperor Ashoka in the third century BC. But in the south they go back much further. Their language group, which we call Dravidian, is the fifth largest in the world: it includes Telugu Kannada and Malayalam, the other main languages of southern India, each of which has a long history and a great literature. But where Dravidian speakers originated is still a mystery. Clues to their origins are lost, perhaps for ever, in prehistory (though it is possible they may yet be recovered in the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley civilization). Their language has affinities with Elamite, the archaic and long-dead language of Persia. Mysteriously, it may also be linked through the Altaic speech of central Asia with Japanese, of all languages – but that connection is so controversial and in any case so far back in prehistory that for the moment it must be set aside. The northwest Indian–Iranian root is the one which at present looks most promising; indeed an outpost of Dravidian, Brahui, is still spoken by transhumant people in the uplands of Baluchistan on the Iranian border with Pakistan. Dravidian speakers almost certainly came into south India from this area some time during the last few millennia BC.
Meanwhile the ‘Aryans’, Sanskrit speakers, migrated through the Hindu Kush into north-west India in the middle part of the second millennium BC, settling first in the north-west frontier, the Indus valley and the Punjab, and then, in the first millennium, in the Ganges–Jumna plain. Their language is Indo-European, distantly related to Latin and Greek and the western. European languages. It is the language of classical Indian civilization, of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Mahabarata and the Ramayana. The modern northern Indian dialects, Punjabi, for example, Marathi, Bengali and Hindi, are all derived from Sanskrit. The southern languages, on the other hand, are all from the completely unrelated Dravidian root.
It used to be thought that the Aryans were the only begetters of Indian civilization. A century ago, as European imperialists sought validation of their domination of far older cultures, they lighted on the Aryans as their progenitors. As the authors of the oldest scriptures in world, in some sense the Indian Brahminical sages could be seen as standing at the root of Indo-European as well as Indian culture. Out of all this German Indologists in particular extracted crackpot ideas about the core values of Teutonic society, and weird racialist theories about the supremacy of the Aryan over the Semitic and the African; it was the ideological foundation of the Aryan ideas used by the Nazis.
But of course the real history was much more rich, complex and elusive. Already in the 1920s the discovery of a great literate urban civilization in the Indus Valley in the Bronze Age – long before the ‘Aryan’ arrival in India – had thrown into question the relative contributions of the ‘Aryan’ and the Dravidian to India’s cultural make-up. Even today the significance of these sensational discoveries is the subject of passionate debate, and not just among scholars.
Many now believe, surely rightly, that some of the oldest conceptions (perhaps we should say obsessions?) of Indian civilization, are pre-Aryan: yoga, tantra, the worship of the goddess – and perhaps, too, one of the most characteristic Hindu ideas, ahimsa, non-violence. Transmitted through Buddhism to medieval Hinduism and on to the likes of Gandhi, it is still alive today. Some ideas are probably even earlier. The Great God Siva, who has long been suspected as being pre-Aryan, may be pre-Dravidian too, if the Mesolithic dancing shaman in the caves of Bhimbetka is anything to go by, with his trident, horns and bangles. The elephant-headed Ganesh and the monkey-faced Hanuman are presumably far older than Indo-European religion in India. Indeed the more archaeologists discover, the more the bounds can be pushed back.
So it was from these prehistoric substrates, along with their own particular genius, that the Tamils built their civilization, later assimilating Sanskritic culture to their own. And whatever profound influences the Sanskritic, Islamic and Christian may have exerted – and however much we discount the nationalist myths of today’s Dravidian politicians – it is still true to say that there has been a continuous and relatively unbroken development of civilization in the south from prehistory to the present day.
The distinctive qualities of a civilization are often as much the product of landscape and climate as of history. Tamil civilization arose in a climate of fierce extremes, in particular the enervating annual cycle of autumn monsoons and scorching summer heat. The blessings of nature here are superabundant, but they are also unpredictable and can be taken away with terrifying violence, especially in the years of cyclones, which can be absolutely devastating. The effect of living with such extremes is everywhere to be seen in the Tamil thought world; in their myths and beliefs, in their attitudes to love and sex, nature and society. There is a deeprooted preoccupation with extremes, and the need to control them. So theirs is a culture which values restraint, both in its psychological and its material life. A central practical concern, for example, is the control of water, and for this reason Tamil Nadu is pre-eminently a land of tanks and irrigation.
By the end of summer here the rivers are mostly dry and one may walk across the bed of the Vaigai in the middle of Madurai. Even the main flood of the Cavery, the Coleroon, is reduced to a shallow flow and intermittent pools; the paddy-fields are burned up, bone-hard, brown, the rutted tracks hard as iron on bare feet. Then, when the tremendous rains come at monsoon time, ’when the rains fall on the red earth’, as the Tamil poets say, the rivers rise and fill up the tanks everywhere. Every village, every temple, has a tank, an artificial reservoir, a brick- or stone-lined pool with steps, and a covered mandapa to give shade. These are a source of water throughout the rest of the year, where people drink, wash and bathe, and where the children swim and play. You pass them all the way down on the train: there are thirty thousand registered by the state government in Tamil Nadu, leaving aside uncountable numbers of smaller ponds and pools. Virtually all are pre eighteenth century, and some still in use go back as far as the seventh century, still carrying their weathered inscriptions which testify to the civic spirit of thousand-year-old management committees. The tank which feeds Chidambaram, for example, was built in the eleventh century and will continue to be the biggest man-made lake in India until the Narmada dam is finished.
Not surprisingly, water has long been viewed here as sacred; the act of purification by washing is the central ritual act of Hindus’ daily worship, which no Indian omits to do. Unlike most cultures they never lost this idea of the sacrality, the life-giving force of water. The Tamil lands are ringed by sacred bathing places, streams, shores, waterfalls, rivers and tanks. Rivers in particular were and are viewed as sacred; and the Cavery above all is revered by Tamils as Ponni, ‘the Lady of Gold’, a form of ‘liquid Sakti’, or divine energy, which nurtures the people. It was praised in poetry as far back as the time of the Roman empire, and still today, on the eighteenth day of the solar month Adi, in the middle of the heat (in late July), Tamils celebrate the rising of the Cavery, which is considered to happen punctually on this day every year. ‘To be on the banks of the Cavery listening to the strains of southern music,’ says a Tamil proverb, ‘is to have a taste of eternal bliss.’
So in this climate and landscape, with its natural boundaries of sea and mountain, and the austere plateau of the Deccan, Tamil civilization arose. It was made by a people with deep roots in their landscape, possessed of an ancient, copious and versatile language and a profound sense of beauty. Its first flowering is known through a remarkable body of classical poetry which was largely rediscovered in the nineteenth century, the so-called Sangam poems, which fertilized all that followed. And what followed was remarkable. From then on until today there has been a continuous flood of great literature in Tamil, poetry, epics, grammars, drama and philosophy, including a rich Muslim Tamil literature.
The greatest era of the south is generally agreed to have been the Chola dynasty between the ninth and thirteenth centuries; an era which has been compared (not entirely unjustly) to Renaissance Italy and classical Greece, both for the range of its creations and the astonishing fertility of its imagination. The Chola period is still alive in the minds of traditional Tamils. Its kings and saints are still real people in a way found in few other societies now. The oral poetry of the saints, which was strongly rooted in classical poetry, is a still-living tradition, not only in temples and religious houses, but also in popular culture. In the fifties and sixties, for example, many hit movies were based on its stories, and Sivaji Ganeshan, the greatest character actor of southern cinema, played wandering saints like Sundaramurti in his days as a juvenile lead. The greatest of all Tamil literary works, the twelfth-century epic of Kamban, is also still recited in folk plays; it receives earthy but careful exegesis from the actors, incorporating what appear to be genuine oral traditions of the author or himself and of the circumstances of its composition.
The riches of southern culture were virtually unknown to the outside world until the nineteenth century. From then on, as more of the ancient texts became available (and they are still being recovered), the extent of the achievement of Tamil civilization became apparent. Tamil Nadu now appears to be one of the great classical cultures – perhaps, indeed, the last one. The fact that these traditions are still alive in the late twentieth century makes a journey to Tamil Nadu all the more charged with expectation for the interested outsider. The train journey south to Chidambaram and the Cavery takes you into its heartland.
Late in the afternoon we crossed the Vellar river, and entered the northern edge of the Cavery delta; here you meet the landscape of rice paddies and palm forests, but the soil was parched and dry after a summer of no rain. Long lines of acacia palms stretched as far as the eye could see, lining the horizon. Brilliant white egrets in the brown fields; a pair of yoked bullocks with bright blue painted horns swaying across parched red earth; brightly painted plaster shrines – to horse deities and red-skinned moustachioed demigods – sitting in little thatched compounds among the trees. Then at last, still several miles off, we glimpsed the temple towers over the darkening palm forests.
It was dusk when we reached Chidambaram. An elderly couple got off, assisted by a wiry and even older porter in an orange turban, who helped them to the cycle rickshaws outside. On the platform, by the door to the station master’s office, is a glittering weighing machine with mirrors and whirring coloured wheels which tells your fortune on a printed card. (‘You will find the joy of reciprocated love.’ On the reverse: ‘Remember to flush the lavatory: antisocial behaviour costs us all.’) Above it is a glass case containing a brightly painted statue of Nataraja performing his dance of bliss: ‘Welcome to the city of the Cosmic Dance’. Around the station you will also find Vishnu and Kali, and the symbols of other faiths, including Islam and Christianity: Southern Railways is nothing if not eclectic. But Siva is the great god of Chidambaram and, as if to emphasize it, Nataraja surmounts the roof outside beneath a little gopura where the station name glows in neon in English and Tamil. Facing him, his faithful bull Nandi sits in a roundabout across a dusty forecourt, where the cycle rickshaws queue patiently for the infrequent trains, ringing their bells in hopeful unison when any passer-by emerges from the booking-hall.
The dusty station road led along a fence draped with bougainvillea, past darkened pilgrims’ hostels, all empty at this time of year. Only a century ago there used to be nearly seventy such establishments in Chidambaram; only about a dozen are still functioning. Not that the number of people on pilgrimage has lessened – far from it. With mass transport, pilgrimage is booming; it is just that it is quicker now, and few need or wish to stay in places like Chidambaram for more than a few hours. But at festival time in these places Hindu charitable organizations still feed and shelter the holy men and women who constantly wander the roads of India in their millions. I booked a room with a roof fan in the Hotel Tamil Nadu and strolled over the canal bridge into town. In the main street the sweet shops and flower stalls glowed in pools of lamplight: stacks of marigold, jasmine, roses, and slabs of sweets, bright yellow, white, orange and green. At the almond milk stall, the chubby-faced proprietor was preparing the first bowl of the evening, stirring the crumbled nuts into steaming creamy froth, a small-town Vishnu stirring his sea of milk.
I had a dosa, a rice pancake, on a banana-leaf plate at the New Carrier Tiffin Centre (so called because it stands on the corner by Gandhi’s statue). Under a corrugated sheet, an ailing neon strip sputtered fitfully as a family of albino lizards scampered down the wall to eye the clientele. At the back, through a curtain of plastic strips, was the interior of the kitchen: a dark hovel bathed in firelight from a big clay kiln, where a grizzled old man, barechested and glistening with sweat, expertly tossed wafer thin dosas on to a flat steel griddle. Across the road, distorted film music swelled and crashed at the Lena cinema as the early evening show churned out the latest iddly western. Around the statue of Gandhi auto-rickshaws did battle, horns blaring, like a scene from the TV ‘Mahabharata’. Clouds of dust were rising in the last pink light behind the cinema. Meanwhile, ignored by all, the Mahatma strode forward confidently into an uncertain future, faded circlets of flowers still hung round his neck from his birthday celebrations.
Soon the great mass of the east tower of the temple reared up black against the starry sky, gilded finials glinting. Inside, the wide courtyard was open to the sky. To the right the hall with a thousand pillars, and beyond it the huge tank, glinting in the moonlight; in the interior, granite corridors stretched off into the darkness, peopled by beardless androgynes, dressed in white loincloths with shaved foreheads, their long shiny black hair worn in a tight bun to one side, half-man, half-woman. As one old British administrator remembered them: ‘sleek well-grown fellows… the boys pretty neophytes in white clothing, their sallow shapeliness especially charming. The younger ones reminded me of Italian angels.’
Mr Velu, Mala’s neighbour, came up and joined us. He wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt with a row of biros in his top pocket, and a vesti, the long wrap worn by Tamil men which they lift up and tuck into their front waistband. He used to work in an agricultural office in the north of the state.
‘I have retired now since you were last here: I came back here because my daughter works in the Indian bank here – 2200 rupees a month.’
Like most Indians he was quite unembarrassed about discussing his financial affairs in the greatest detail. ‘I am receiving 1600 rupees pension monthly,’ he volunteered. ‘But food is so much cheaper here in Chidambaram and in the countryside than in Madras – we can feed a household of five for 2000 a month. So here I can save a thousand a month to go towards my daughter’s marriage. Really I came here to live with them. My son is at Annamalai University, my daughter working here; I lost my wife four years ago, you see. I come here every day to the temple. Also I go to read in the university library through the middle of the day when it is hot. What better way to spend the time than to worship god and to read in the library?’
Behind us the drummer wrapped up his instrument in an old figured cloth, put it in the chest and closed the lid. Then Mala appeared: her oval smiling face, her black hair showing streaks of grey now, but still centre-parted and tightly brushed and plaited with white jasmine at the back. She gave me a slightly bashful smile, hands together, fingertips touching in greeting.
‘I received your letter yesterday. Come home for tiffin.’
We exchanged family news. Jaya was working in Madras now, in a clerical job for a company making coated ribbons for computers. She and Bharati and Sarasu were all sharing a little house out in the suburbs. Kumar had been in Saudi Arabia for three years, but he had not had a happy time; he had been cheated of his rightful money either by his employers or by the agent in Madras – it was a common story. Balu, the black sheep of the family, was still living at home. He was doing a bit of dogsbodying at a video studio which had opened up in Chidambaram and hanging out with wealthier friends who could afford to lounge about all day in Hawaian shirts, quiffing their hair like the latest Tamil movie stars. But he really wanted to get into driving for a living; maybe start with a secondhand auto-rickshaw and move on to his own taxi. As for Mala’s husband Mani, he still sat in the same place near the door, still listening to the main news on All India Radio, keeping up with the world. His sight was gone now but for a blur of light; his main pleasure was going for walks with their neighbour, Mr Velu, who would sit and talk with him in the passageway, and take him by the hand to the temple for the evening puja.
Mala pored over the pictures of our babies. Was I troubled to have only girls? In Tamil Nadu this was a big problem because of raising the money for dowries – as she was all too well aware. I told her I was delighted. She walked into the kitchen end of the room to make some tea. There was no power, the fan was motionless and the hot stillness of the air was broken only by the distant sound of children playing in the street outside. Mani stared into space. Looking around the bare walls of the room, nothing seemed to have changed since I had first sat here six years before: the wooden bed opposite the door; the Usha sewing-machine with its foot pedal; on the floor the old padlocked metal chest where Mala kept her treasures and secret things. On the walls were still the same old religious calendars; over the bed on a nail was a plastic pilgrim souvenir of Somaskanda – the Saivite Holy Family; lastly a faded black and white picture of the Mother, the strange French woman who had established her ashram at Pondicherry in the 1920s with the Bengali guru Aurobindo. (Mala had stayed there and prayed at his tomb when Mani’s sight failed and she had travelled the length and breadth of Tamil country looking for a reprieve.) Hanging down on a string over the sewing-machine was Mala’s well-thumbed copy of the Panchang, the religious almanac which all traditional Tamils live by, where you will find every eclipse and conjunction, every auspicious and inauspicious day, every religious festival and special puja – the world as seen through Tamil time.
As we sat there I could feel the heat already soaking into my bones, and that light-headedness which comes with such a sudden and abrupt change in the pace and focus of one’s life. Mala came back with the tea in little stainless steel cups. Then, in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, she announced: ‘Goddess Sivakami appeared to me in a dream.’
Sivakami is the name of the Great Goddess, Siva’s consort, here in Chidambaram. Like all such manifestations of divinity in India, she has many guises. She is most famous for her terrifying aspects, like the omnipresent Kali whose chthonic powers must always be propitiated, especially by men, who from time immemorial in India have both feared and worshipped the primal female power. At Cape Comorin the goddess is enshrined as the ever-auspicious virgin, the Devi; she is the ‘love-eyed’ at Kanchi, the ‘one who cools’ disease at Samayapuram, and the giver of children at Madurai. Nowhere on earth as in India, and nowhere in India as in the south, are the powers of the Great Mother still accorded such wide reverence: and this, paradoxically, despite the pervasive discrimination and violence here against women, and especially female children. Here in Chidambaram, Mala’s favourite incarnation of the goddess, Sivakami, is ‘she who is beloved of Siva’, mother, wife and lover; the embodiment of benign, auspicious and healthy female power. She has her own shrine within the temple, an exquisite and unspoiled twelfth-century building in honey-coloured stone. Sivakami is like an inner voice to Mala, a guardian angel; and she never omits to pray to the goddess every day.
‘Sivakami came two weeks ago. She spoke to me and told me I must go to Tiruchendur for Skanda Shashti. This time of the year is the main festival at Tiruchendur. The whole thing lasts twelve days: sixth day symbolizes triumph of good over evil. On this day, called Soora Samharam, there is very big puja there for Lord Murugan. Also there is a very big festival on the beach. This is next Saturday. It is very beautiful, a very lucky time. There is a pilgrim bus tour going there from Chidambaram. You are coming?’
It did not sound like a question. Mala had not forgotten our meeting with Rajdurai Dikshithar four years ago, when my horoscope had been read. This was the very journey he had foreseen for me, written in the charts of the temple astrologer at Chidambaram; one day, he had said, I would return to go on pilgrimage to Tiruchendur. Rajdurai’s words had been the last thing on my mind coming out from London for a short stay. I had just planned to sit still, meet friends and take stock of any life. I had not the slightest wish to go careering the length and breadth of Tamil Nadu on a bus tour. Tiruchendur, I had thought, I would visit one day in the future, at my leisure, preferably ensconced in the back of an Ambassador car with Rebecca and the girls, with a few nice hotels to look forward to. As far as Mala was concerned, though, the moment had arrived.
‘We go in three days’ time, on Friday night; come back early Tuesday. Visit twelve big temples, many pujas. Many holy baths in the sea and sacred waterfalls. Cost is 200 rupees. I have already asked the organizer to keep a seat for you, as the trip will be sold out. The bus will be leaving at nine from the Vinayaka shrine at the junction of North and East Car Street. Come to my house for tiffin at eight.’
I could hardly have refused.
We had three days free before the big journey. Mala is not the sort to let the time go by unfilled. The next morning she suggested we make a trip to the famous shrine at Vaithisvarancoil. We could go there to do a puja before the pilgrimage, and then meet Mala’s daughter Punnidah and her husband and baby at Mayavaram at about 8.30. Vaithisvarancoil was the first place Rajdurai Dikshithar had told me to visit on my pilgrimage. It seemed a good way to start.
At about three in the afternoon, with the sun slanting over the flower stalls, we walked to the bus station. There are other shrines which Mala prefers, but she goes to Vaithisvarancoil every month to do puja and pray for her family. The bus takes you over the wide Kollidam branch of the Cavery river and into the delta: a fertile land of rice paddies fringed with forests of acacia and palmyra palms. At this time of day it is nothing short of gorgeous, when the heat fades and the sea breeze comes up. Then the landscape becomes suffused with a golden light and the colours stand out with dazzling intensity. You pass tanks carpeted with purple lilies, clumps of banana and bamboo, and little painted shrines in the fields; in the paddies the new rice sparkles in the sunlight. It is a time when everyone comes out into the village streets to enjoy the air and talk with friends.
I sat on the men’s side of the bus. As far as the Kollidam bridge my companion was a rather serious young man doing a degree at Annamalai University: a BA in tourism. A sign of the times indeed, as Rao’s government loosens the fetters of forty odd years of Nehru’s socialism and lets in foreign companies and investment. Everyone is hot on tourism these days: potentially a big business here, as it has been up north on the Delhi–Agra–Rajasthan circuit.
‘We have many excellent things for the foreign visitor in Tamil Nadu but facilities need to be upgraded,’ he said, and proceeded to fire questions at me with a fierce look of concentration, as if this were a test interview and his course supervisor were breathing over his shoulder.
‘So, first, what is your opinion of the touristic facilities here? Transport, hotels, communications, infrastructure? Starting with Chidambaram. Please enumerate.’
‘Er…’
‘Please be frank.’
‘Well…’
‘It is not five-star Taj type, am I right?’
Now it has to be said that the hotels in Chidambaram have not elicited uniform enthusiasm: ‘the low point of our trip,’ wrote one respondent in the latest trendy handbook; ‘stay in another town,’ said another, curtly. Western-style tourism here is a new phenomenon; as recently as 1977, an Indian guidebook recommended the visitor try, in descending order, the railway retiring room, the public works department inspection bungalow, or private lodgings and choultries for pilgrims: ‘Nadar’s choultry’, it says, ‘is neat and tidy; advance reservation can be made with the choultry manager. Provisions can be obtained in the bazaar.’
Not exactly the Hilton, then. But that was what appealed to me about it: you weren’t stuck in the dreadful uniformity of international hotels. They ignored all that here; it was part of an older pattern of long-distance travel. And though a couple of modern hotels have been built since then, they have not yet really abandoned the old way of doing things. Take the Hotel Tamil Nadu in Railway Feeder Road. ‘Five-star Taj type’ it is not; I have seen the staff drive some guests (especially impatient north Indians) up the wall with their opaque smiles and their dedicated lack of purpose. But it is comfortable and clean, and works perfectly well. In fact (I confess) it is one of my favourite hotels in all India, but I could not begin to explain why. I could see I was beginning to disappoint my friend, who had clearly thought that, as far as Western tourism was concerned, I was the horse’s mouth.
‘Our new chief minister, Dr Jayalalitha, has big plans for the state. She has designated several new tourist zones in Tamil Nadu. Chidambaram is one of these, and Mahabalipuram too. At Tranquebar also there will be a new tourist hotel built by the Taj chain, converting the old Danish Fort on the seashore. Also plans are afoot to construct a highway from Madras down to Cape Comorin; a 500-mile dual-carriageway coastal road which will open up all of Tamil Nadu to tourism.’
My heart sank, though I did not say so. The times, after all, are there to be moved with, and I could think of no one in Chidambaram who would not welcome a new injection of investment into the town, and that included the temple priests. My companion was now in full flow.
‘There are also many opportunities for touristic and folkloric performance here, such as they have with the Thrissur Pooram festival at Trichur in Kerala. Next year there will be one hundred elephants taking part in the changing of the multi-coloured parasols. It is a magnificent spectacle which draws people from far and wide; now there are many similar possibilities being mooted here. For example, a dance festival inside the Nataraja temple to bring international artists and tourists to Chidambaram, put the City of the Cosmic Dance on the world map. What is your opinion of the touristic potential of this?’
My heart sank again, though I tried to smile enthusiastically. The writing is on the wall; no doubt the packaging of culture for tourists will come here too. And all will welcome it. For a time, at least.
The future minister of tourism shook hands stiffly when he got down at the Kollidam bridge, a perplexed look on his face; I could see I had been a let-down. No sooner had he gone than another young man took his place; he was almost beside himself with glee.
‘What is your native land?’
‘England. London. And yours?’
‘Here in Sirkali. What is your job in England?’
‘I work for the BBC’ (It seemed the most convenient way to describe a life in TV.)
‘What is your salary?’ (Indians, as I have said already, are completely uninhibited about discussing the minutiae of their financial arrangements with total strangers, a habit which some might find excruciating. I was evasive.
‘You are working here?’ I asked.
‘Since Christmas I have been working in Saudi. I have just returned for a holiday for two weeks.’
‘How did you find it in Saudi?’
A delighted smile enveloped his face. ‘Very nice. I am working as a carpenter. BSc qualified. I am receiving two thousand rials per month, not including food, lodging and laundry, which my employers are also providing.’
That was over five hundred dollars. Over fifteen thousand rupees. For an ordinary Tamil it was a simply fabulous sum. He told me his story. He was not married, and he had already saved several thousand dollars in just ten months. As the story progressed he squealed with delight and squeezed my hand, refusing to let go till we reached Sirkali, chortling with happiness at his good fortune. He was plump, with the smoothest of skins; he had a little moustache in the style cultivated by the latest Tamil movie stars. He wore Nike sports shoes, neatly cut slacks, a T-shirt with a golf pro logo on it, and on his wrist (as he did not neglect to show me) a gold watch, ‘eighteen carat’.
At Sirkali he gave my hand one last squeeze and bounced off, light footed, giving me a cheery wave as he disappeared into the crowds around the bazaar. His delight at being a success in his own land was a pleasure to behold. What a contrast with Mala’s son Kumar, who was working as a warehouse supervisor and storeman in a pharmacy in Buraidh; his promised income of 160 dollars had turned out to be only half that, after deductions made for food and washing. Judging by his last letter, he would be lucky to come back with any savings at all.
Beyond Sirkali the flat green landscape of paddies and palms stretches away eastwards to the sea and south across the delta. You can see the temple towers, the gopuras, of Vaithisvarancoil, from two or three miles away. The bus dropped us off at the side of the temple soon after four. A wide sandy lane surrounds the outer walls of the temple precinct where the huge wooden cars are pulled during the annual festivals. Along the lane are the priests’ houses, with their pillared fronts, terracotta roofs and plastered walls, painted with the red and white stripes which always signify a Saivite temple. On the south side the lane was lined with stalls strung with streamers and flags. Mala marched up and down looking for the best price for coconuts and bananas for puja. While she bargained, I had a cup of tea in the Kumaran Vegetarian Hotel, a cavernous tea shop with an old pendulum clock and a big wooden dresser where a pan of incense wafted smoke under a row of deities and portraits of the Gandhi family. We left our shoes in the shop where Mala bought all the other bits and pieces necessary for puja – camphor, vilva leaves, and fruit. Then we turned into the wide approach which leads up to the temple gate.
The temple at Vaithisvarancoil is dedicated to Siva as Lord of Healing, literally ‘The Lord who is our Physician’ and is very popular among Tamils, especially those suffering from disease, sickness and mental trouble. It is widely believed that Siva will cure even incurable diseases here. People also come here to fulfil vows or perform the rituals for young children. (This was where Mala had wanted to bring our daughter for her first birthday, for the first giving of rice.) It is one of the famous shrines sung by the Tamil Saivite saints in the Tevaram, so it must have been in existence at least by the seventh century AD. Then Appar came here to hymn ‘the Lord of a thousand names, Lord of mantras, tantras and healing potions, who by his grace cures our incurable disease’ – the disease which Appar makes a metaphor for existence itself.
The shrine has a beautiful colonnaded tank whose waters are believed to have curative powers; it has an ancient and sacred neem tree whose leaves and bark have medicinal qualities; the food offerings prepared in the temple kitchens and given at puja are also thought to be beneficial to health. Off the beaten track as far as the tourist is concerned, you will find it in no Western guidebook, but to the Tamils it is a loved and famous spot.
Vaithisvarancoil is also a good place to get an idea of the classic layout of the Tamil temple. Past the pilgrim stalls you come to the main gate, a pyramidal tower whose weathered sculptures tower over the surrounding town and countryside. This is the gopura, one of the most characteristic features of the Tamil landscape, so well known that it has become the badge of the state government. The word simply means ‘gateway’. In early southern architecture, the tower over the central shrine was the main feature and the gates were small. But in the tenth century, gate towers became more prominent and soon rose over 150 feet, fantastical pyramids teeming with brightly coloured statues of gods and spirits, as garishly coloured as the pediments of ancient Greek temples.
As in the Gothic cathedral boom (or the skyscraper craze in the thirties in. the USA, for that matter) once the idea became the rage, it did not stop. These great constructions were thrown up in literally thousands of shrines all over the south between the eleventh and the seventeenth centuries. In some of the big temples, all the enclosures had their gate towers; at Sriringam, for example, on its forested island in the Cavery river, there are no fewer than twentyone, the last of which was completed only in 1987. Some of them soar to well over 200 feet, and are covered with sculpture so strange and exotic, so unlike any other architectural tradition of the world, that when glimpsed for the first time above the palm forests it is easy to imagine one has found oneself by accident on another planet.
The gopuras mark out the rectangle of the sacred area. Walk under the gate at Vaithisvarancoil and you enter a long and gloomy pillared hall, painted a dark institutional green; here the temple carriages are stored, and there are stalls selling pilgrim literature and pictures. This hall lies along the axis of the temple, and once inside you can look all the way down the main nave and through the inner gate to the sanctum itself, where you can just make out a flickering circle of lamplight nearly a hundred yards away.
It is basically a very simple architecture, but the effect is intensely dramatic. On a larger or smaller scale this is the essential idea of Tamil temple architecture, an idea which in places like Madurai is elaborated in a stupendous manner and scale to create some of the greatest sacred buildings on earth.
The tall gate towers, like cathedral spires, are intended to be visible from far away across the landscape, but the principle is the opposite of Gothic architecture, for the Gothic cathedral encloses space. Once you are inside a Tamil shrine you find yourself in a vast rectangular area open to the sky, and then a dark labyrinth unlit by the sun, in which space becomes smaller and smaller as you go inwards. Finally you enter the sanctum, which in a Siva temple contains the linga, the simple black stone cylinder, phallic in origin, which represents the presence of the Great God. This place is called the gharb griya literally the ‘womb chamber’, the warm and dark space where you encounter the divine. The act of worship itself is called ‘puja’, the whole encounter which takes place between deity and devotee is darshan, literally ‘seeing’. (Television is doordarshan, ‘long-distance seeing’.) The pilgrim comes for darshan of the Lord; the Lord gives darshan.
The encounter is lit only by lamplight; your senses are heightened by the sound of music, drums and cymbals, by the singing and chanting, by the sight and heat of the flame, and by the smell of incense, ghee and flowers – sometimes in fact it is the smell which is the strongest of the sensations during puja, for the air of the inner sanctum is often saturated with the sweetness of jasmine, by the pungency of aromatic incense and the cloying thickness of ghee.
The intention of all this is to take the devotee inwards, away from the bright sun and harsh shadows of the day, into a dark and magical world for a purely personal transaction. No matter how large the shrine in Tamil temples, the centre remains simply this small place where the divinity can be encountered directly. Srirangam, for example, covers 155 acres – it would take up a sizable part of the City of London – with seven concentric enclosures and twenty gopuras; but at its heart is a tiny round chamber where a black stucco Vishnu offers darshan to the faithful in the warm flickering darkness, reclining on his seven-headed serpent Ananta, ‘Endless’.
We headed off to the right towards the tank to buy our ticket. At the counter we poured our offerings of natural salt on to the big pile, and took from it some salt and peppercorns, which the devotee eats before going in. By the pile was a basket full of little silver-foil pictures of human limbs, hands, feet, legs, arms, heads, eyes, male and female genitalia and babies, for pilgrims to leave with their prayers. Then we went off to the sanctum for the puja. It was floored with grey-white veined marble. The priest took our names and the prasad – coconuts, bananas, flowers – lit the lamp, recited the ritual in Sanskrit and blessed our offerings, which we received back with the ash from the lamp which Mala daubed across her forehead. We then walked round the shrine.
Temples like this are really huge campuses with dozens of separate shrines and myths: often the pilgrim can encounter stories from shrines all over India in one place, which thus becomes a mnemonic for all the pilgrimage places in India. The more of these gimmicks a shrine has, the more popular it will be and the more revenue it will earn. Conversely there are some magnificent shrines which do not have a special pulling point and which attract few pilgrims from outside their own locality. Vaithisvarancoil, however, is rich in this respect: the local legends connect the shrine with an incident in the Rama legend; there is an important image of Murugan here too. Like all Siva temples, they also keep the statues of the sixty-three Tamil saints, which are revered by all in Tamil lands, and whose poems are recited on the big festivals. The planets too are represented here, and the special shrine to the planet Mars which I was instructed to visit by Rajdurai Dikshithar. Mala took us to it. Very jolly, this Mars, not martial at all, his four arms bristling with weaponry, but his plump face without a trace of aggression: pudgy cheeks, jolly eyes, a red cloth veiling his pot belly, and a self-satisfied smile. Rather like the chap on the bus to Sirkali in fact. Mala waved me in front of the priest, who fired away.
‘Star?’
‘Arbitam.’
Mala told him my story. He did puja for us, and loaded me with packets of ash and kun kum. Thin face, bent, skin like a shrivelled mummy. His eyes were startled, as if he had seen a ghost, but he greeted my inquiry politely and seriously.
‘Arbitam the star rules Mars.’
‘Why is Mars important for me?’
‘He remedies defects in horoscope.’
‘Ah, good,’ I said. (Starting with excessive wind, I thought to myself.) ‘This is because I don’t have enough earth?’
‘Yes,’ said Mala seriously. ‘When we build a house we do puja to Mars for a good foundation; people are the same. You are always flying in the air, Michael, much imagining. Your children will give you a good foundation.’
‘I thought it was supposed to be the other way round?’ I said.
She laughed.
‘Sometimes it is mother and father who need, and children provide.’
We walked to the tank, beautiful in the evening light, with a domed hall on an island in the middle. Some people were bathing on the steps, some sitting reading; a few children were doing their homework in a corner. Mala bathed her feet and washed. Exquisite light now, the sun setting over the palm trees in the outer enclosure sending long rays through the cloisters; the lovely warm coppery colour of the weathered brick of the towers, crumbling, sprouting grass and flowers, swallows swooping; the sound of temple music, drums and reedy trumpets, from deep in the interior.
Then we stumbled on a remarkable scene: a young woman with an absent face was being exorcized by an older woman. White-haired and vigorous, wearing a bright orange patterned sari, hair swept back in a bun: catechizing, cajoling, at times loudly, at times in a whisper. Quite a crowd gathered. At first the patient said nothing; she appeared depressed and was closely attended by anxious parents and friends. On the floor the older woman had a bowl of ash, a framed image of Mariamman with flowers and small pictures of several other goddesses. The girl looked as if she was fighting within herself, wringing her fingers. The woman was jocular, her eyes never ceased to smile. We watched as she blew sacred ash on the girl’s left cheek and then slapped her right cheek; slapped again, blew ash right into her face, and held her face in both hands.
At first sight this could have been mistaken for the substance of her ‘cure’, but it soon became apparent that the business with the ash was merely a bit of religious showbiz, playing to the gallery to impress the crowd and the kin; the pictures and divining sticks, mystical squares and yantras, lent metaphysical respectability to the encounter. But the exorcist’s real art seemed to be to talk like a good doctor, or more accurately, like a much-loved granny, who under a brusque, no-nonsense exterior had a heart of gold. She was in her sixties at a guess, strong, handsome, with a lovely clear skin; and she exuded good health – always an encouraging sign in a doctor.
She talked in a way to gain the girl’s confidence, focusing on her absolutely, trying to bring her out of herself. At one point she told the father off for interfering, put her arms round the girl and engaged in a bit of good-natured banter with the crowd, clearly taking the girl’s part against her family who had brought her there. She never acknowledged my presence; but then suddenly in the middle of all this, not looking my way, she called out loudly in English: ‘Sir, where are you from?’
We talked while she massaged the girl strongly and kindly, whispering to her all the while; and strangely enough the patient seemed to become more animated as we all took an interest in her. The exorcist had come from Mayavaram at the request of the family. She told us about Mariamman, the ‘cooling goddess’ who is much sought after in matters of health where women are concerned: ‘She’s like your Virgin Mary, mother of Christ,’ said the woman (a strange idea, this, but then the Tamil Mary whose shrine is on the coast at Velankanni is much more like a Hindu goddess in her cult and rituals, and popular among all communities). The exorcist ended her performance by blowing more holy ash into the girl’s face. In her last prayer for the girl, she used Mary’s name again.
By now, the girl had been loosened up and relaxed by the engaging personality of the healer. Eventually she nodded, replied briefly to some questions and took a drink of water. Progress had been made. The parents stood up; the exorcist spoke to me.
‘I tell her to go and sleep. I’ll see her tomorrow again. Half of the problem is always family. Family and society – these are the people who make people mad. Especially for women here in India life can be very difficult. Now we are between two worlds: they see all Western things, consumer products, romance, different kind of freedom – yet they live in Tamil Nadu. Sex is now a very big problem, cause of much mental unrest here.’ She paused. ‘What these people need is not drugs but to be treated like people. The best skill needed to help these people is simply to conduct the conversation honestly with the patient. Try to get them to accept certain things as true the way they see it. There is a kind of game, a playfulness. They are bogged down in a rut and you have to help them out. Some you cannot help, but most you can.’
‘How did you come to do this job?’
She laughed. ‘Well, my father was a healer. I learned from him sitting with people in our house. I don’t have a degree at Annamalai University, if that is what you mean. How would this have helped me? All this Western gadgetry is no more use than this sacred ash unless you can give patient love and understanding. Naturally there is our own Ayurvedic tradition, diet and exercise, workings of heart, disorder of the bodily functions. We must know about these things. But as the saints say, the most important is love.’ She packed up her bags with a cheery nod of the head. ‘God bless you. Bye-bye.’
As the last light faded over the tank, we strolled round the outer courtyard and came to the sacred tree at the back of the temple. Many of the great Tamil shrines have such trees at the axial place – the mango at Kanchi, the jambu on Srirangam, the kadamba at Madurai. Here at Vaithisvarancoil is a huge and ancient neem tree which spreads over a courtyard with a lovely little roofed shrine built into its roots – a linga for the Lord of Healing flanked by Ganesh and Chandikesvara, the gatekeeper. Many were doing their own pujas here, and lighting lamps. Round the back of the tree a little crowd of people were camped, to sleep the night under its branches. In the shadows a young husband gently tried to coax his wife to be calm. She laughed and then cried out. Mala nodded sympathetically. ‘Family problems,’ she said, as she circled the tree; but the women was clearly distracted in her mind or spirit, one of many people who come here hoping that the god – or just the peaceful atmosphere – will alleviate such affliction.
It was time to get the bus to Mayavaram. We slowly wandered back along the arcade of shops, which were now crowded with people looking at the fruit and flower stalls. Then out into the night with a last look back down the axis of the temple to the distant glimmering light in its heart. Ahead, the last pink hint of sunset behind silhouetted palms and the sound of birds chattering.
Mayavaram is a thriving busy town on the old Cavery river, a rail and road junction with a big bazaar teeming with shops: goldsmiths and silversmiths, electrical goods. ‘This town is famous for lawyers and doctors,’ said Mala. ‘And Brahmin moneylenders,’ she added, with a disapproving curl of her lip. The place was simply throbbing with life, much more so than Chidambaram. At the bus station we found Punnidah. Her husband, Shanmugan, seemed a gentle man, and they were both obviously delighted with their baby, Kailash. They were now living in an industrial estate outside Coimbatore, the big textile town in the north of the state, which proudly advertises itself as ‘the Manchester of India’. We swapped family news; I showed them photographs of our daughters, which brought round an enthusiastic crowd of fellow travellers. Though the oldest of the four sisters, Punnidah was always the quietest and most introverted. She spoke little if any English and always seemed to be washing, cleaning or sewing in the background. She never wore the elegant saris the others did. But she seemed happy now, more assured, and her face would suddenly light up with joy, animated in a way one never saw before.
Mala was very pleased. She thinks Shanmugan is a good man (he was patient, kind and thoughtful), and she took great delight in her first and only grandson. We took some photos and then they boarded the bus. When they were gone we talked for a while in a tiny café in the bus stand.
‘I hope my daughters will all find love and affection as well as security in their marriage. Love like you two love each other. You are lucky.’
‘Well, why don’t you let them have choice in whom they marry, let them marry the person they love?’
‘Love comes with knowing and undergoing together. We believe arranged marriage is still the best way of making secure partnership for life: same people, same community, right age, right horoscope. They do have choice; they meet the boy, they have to like him, to see the seed of love is possible.
‘Look at the divorce rate in your country,’ she continued. ‘Here marriage and family is still held in very great respect. In our community there is great respect between man and woman in marriage. God helps us find our mate.’
‘Did he for you?’
‘I respect my husband. He’s a good man. He has been a good father to our children. I have affection for our lives together. We made the best of our marriage and we brought up good children.’
We made our way over the bus stand through the late-night crowds of travellers to find a bus back to Sirkali, and on to Chidambaram. Through the open windows the night air was cool; the bus lights occasionally illuminated the edges of palm forests and the roadside shrines as we careered down the pitch dark road back over the Kollidam bridge. Tomorrow was Thursday, so after one more day it would be the beginning of the pilgrimage: the night journey to Tiruchendur.
The evening before the pilgrimage, Mala took me for a meal at her father’s house, the house where she was born and grew up. It lies in a street south-west of the temple, in an old Vellala neighbourhood called Ellaiman Koil. The house had been built by her father’s grandfather about 125 years earlier. At that time it had stood on the outskirts of town, and there were fields beyond the back garden; now it is hemmed in by ribbon development and concrete sprawl. It is a fine, three-bay house with a long pitched roof covered with curved terracotta tiles, in overlapping rows four deep which come right down to head height in the street.
The house has been an anchor for Mala; her children stayed there for long periods when they were growing up, when it was hearth and shelter for all the extended family. Over the years since she married she lived in many rented places which were not her own, but this was the family root. The Tamils call it their ur, a word which means your native place. It is an umbilical idea; ask a Tamil in a supermarket in London where his ur is and he may say India. If you meet in Delhi then he will say Tamil Nadu; but if you ask the same question of a Tamil in the streets of Madras or Madurai, he may tell you his current residence and home, but he will invariably qualify that by referring to his real ur, the place whose soil nourished his ancestors, the place where he was born or where his father’s line comes from. Your ur carries a weight of associations. It tells you who you are. Its soil, so Tamils believe, is literally a part of you. This house is Mala’s ur.
We went up the steps, through the vestibule and into the columned living-room: her father greeted us. He was a big man, an old man of eighty-eight; shaven head, stomach muscles sagging and an old man’s breasts, but still a commanding presence. He wore the traditional dress, a loincloth, with a bare chest and ash stripes on his forehead. Like his daughter he was a devout Saivite who had followed the ancient ritual process from birth to old age. Here Mala appeared in a different light, no longer struggling alone to make ends meet in a rented room, but rooted in a strong and long-lasting family and caste tradition; and tradition can be airy and spacious as well as stifling.
Small landowners, all their lives they had made annual gifts to Nataraja and held special pujas for important anniversaries at other great regional shrines. They had founded a small choultry in East Car Street to lodge pilgrims and still gave a part of their surplus as free food. They had never amassed material things, always giving a tithe to religion or charity. In the past they had also donated part of their paddy to feeding poor Brahmin scholars, for although the Brahmins were privileged in the karmic order of things, in the everyday economic reality of the countryside, they were mostly impoverished and needed support from those who shared their ideals. Such families had been mainstays of the old order, which was now changing so fast.
Mala disappeared into the kitchen while her father spoke to me. He had been born in 1907 and raised under the British (he was already forty when they left). Like his wife’s father he had been headman of the town council at Chidambaram, so he spoke enough English to get by. His caste had done well under the British, but not so well in the Dravidian movement since Independence, which had been against religion, caste and the Brahminical order. There had been a massive redistribution of land, wealth and job opportunities in Tamil Nadu under DMK governments from the late sixties onwards, after Congress was booted out. Even more so since the eighties, when swingeing positive discrimination in favour of the lower castes had changed the whole social makeup of the state. It had been about time, most felt. But small Vellala landowners, still farming a few acres, committed to the ancient traditions, were stripped of any influence, and were now very much representatives of an older world.
Mala’s father was such a man. In the old days they had farmed 120 acres of paddy and betel nuts with a few tamarind trees near Killai, on the road to the sea. ‘That was in the days when there was no money,’ her father explained. ‘Only paddy. The workers who built the house worked only for paddy, and so did the field labourers.’ Now Mala’s brother, the active head of family, who lived here with his wife and daughter, farmed only the twenty-five acres which remained.
The father spoke slowly, deliberately, partly because of his age, but also because he was clearly someone who had been good at weighing up situations and people; he was a man who knew the value of things. ‘Our community are the traditional farmers of Tamil country. Our name Vellala comes from vellanmai in Tamil speech. Vellan means ‘water’; anmai means ‘managing’: we were people who managed the water here in Chola Nadu, which means the Cavery delta. And in rice country, the main job is water managing.’
Mala popped her head round the door: ‘Our other name is Karkotta Vellalas: people who wait for the rain, save the rain; gathering it in tanks and saving it for irrigation.’
He nodded. ‘Everything here depends on irrigating, bringing water,’ he continued; ‘this was the job of our community, for every community has its job. But we are the ancient people of the soil; full bred, not migrating.’
Mala’s sister came out of the kitchen with tea and rice puffs. Above their father’s head, running round the walls of the livingroom, was a narrow shelf with pictures of the family: at their moments of rites of passage, the special pujas, celebrations, birthdays, marriages, lamented children. There was father’s eightieth birthday celebration at Tirukkadiyur, the great shrine of Yama, the God of Death and ‘Keeper of Dharma’. There was their mother’s father too, wearing the black coat and hat of a clerk. And there was Mala’s wedding photo from 1959. Mani was twenty-four, she was eighteen. Solemn faced. Unsmiling. They looked more well-to-do then. Now she had the marks of life on her.
‘There are many stories about our origin,’ he went on. ‘They say that thousands of years ago, when the people knew nothing of cultivation and irrigation, drought fell on the world. People prayed to the goddess Earth to help; out of her own body she made a man carrying a plough who knew the secrets of agriculture, of how to till the soil. His offspring are the Vellala. Children of the goddess,’ he said, with a little smile as if to anticipate my scepticism.
*
Mala’s sister-in-law brought banana leaves, which she placed on the floor. Then in the light of oil-lamps we ate rice and sambhar the men first, as is the custom, the women only later. Around us the wooden pillars and painted architraves, the photos, the pictures of the family gods, conveyed a sense of rootedness in traditional time. Mala’s father’s generation were almost gone now, and Tamil Nadu would not see his like again. They were, one imagined, not so far from the people recorded in the Cholan inscriptions of a thousand years ago on the temple walls, the free peasantry who supported the high culture of the Cholan kingdom in alliance with kings and Brahmins. It was an order which had sustained the south for two thousand years. But it depended on an unfree or semi-free peasantry working below it, and that could not survive India’s revolution into democracy.
‘We are Vaisya caste,’ the father continued. ‘In the time of the British, the Britishers tried to write down every caste, to fix things which cannot be fixed. In the time of my grandfather they made a census and wrote us down as Sudras’ (the lowest caste above the untouchables: the labouring and servile caste). ‘But this was mistake; we say we are Vaisyas. The ancient law book, the book of Manu, says Vaisyas are permitted to keep cattle, cultivate the land, give wealth, to sacrifice, read scriptures, and to buy and sell; this is our right and our tradition. It greatly upset my grandfather. We say we are the old community of the land from even before the Brahmins were here. We were never servants of the higher-quality people and cannot be Sudra.’
The British came to agree, and to value the Vellala’s work ethic and moral sensibility in much the same way that they valued the well-to-do, church-going, industrial working class in their own part of the empire. (Funnily enough, I know a Vellala doctor from Chidambaram who was a GP in Blackburn for twenty-five years and found himself very much at home in the traditional Lancashire working-class ethos.) A later census described the Vellala as ‘peace-loving, frugal and industrious; in the cultivation of rice, betel, tobacco they have perhaps no equal in the world… and will not condescended to work of a degrading nature’. The British also noticed that in religion they were more strict than the Brahmins: ‘abstaining from intoxicating liquor or meat’. This is still true and is rigorously maintained by Mala’s children, even when surrounded by the temptations of Madras.
These were the values passed down by their grandfather. ‘We spent more time in his house than in our own when I grew up,’ said Bharati. ‘He told us, be honest, don’t cheat people, work hard, stand on your own two feet, and you will do fine, earn enough to make a good enough living. Didn’t you, Grandad?’ Grandad nodded, amused.
‘As for marriage, Grandad said if you have a good heart then you will find someone with a good heart.’
Mala said his advice to her was more blunt: ‘Pray to Nataraja but make sure your money’s safe in the bank.’ At this he laughed and shook his head ruefully.
Later Bharati took me round the house and showed me some of its secrets. At the little staircase where you enter from the street, she explained, every morning before sunrise, grandmother brushes the ground and splashes the clean dust with fresh cow dung and water. Then she marks out the kolam of rice flour before the threshold.
‘This is not only for auspiciousness,’ said Bharati, ‘but as a first sacrifice of the day, to show mercy and kindness even to the most inferior creatures.’
‘What do you mean inferior creatures?’
‘Insects.’
‘Insects?’
‘Yes: this is why it must be rice flour, so that they may eat it.’
Inside the latticed entrance porch is a kind of upper lobby, the thinnai, which has a raised platform for sitting or sleeping.
‘Here grandfather would receive visitors and watch the world go by, or house pilgrims who needed shelter or rest: that is, strangers who would be given hospitality but not be invited to share the family hearth,’ Bharati went on. ‘Here in the thinnai at five every evening the family lights the traditional lamp for Lakshmi which will burn through the night.’
Then you go through the door into the living-room, where her grandfather and I had talked and eaten. This has a large square light well in the middle, which is surrounded by a row of old wooden columns. This space gives light and fresh air but here also the family pray to the sun and eat their rice milk and jaggery at Pongal, the annual harvest festival. The living space is divided by a curtain, there are two small rooms off it and a roof space above for the family treasures, bronzes, vessels and marriage gifts, including beautiful and ornate gold wedding necklaces.
The main part of the living-room has a bench along the wall. In the shadows are a TV and fridge. Here the family entertain guests and set the table – ‘lay the banana leaf’, as they say in Tamil.
The kitchen was at the back of the house; There was a little altar on a shelf with pictures of Murugan, Lakshmi, Venkateshwara, and three small statues of Vinayaka covered with flowers. Though the family deity is Nataraja, like all Tamils they have a special affection for the elephant-headed Ganesh, and on the family land they built and maintain a little temple to him. Here in the kitchen they do their morning puja and at dusk when they light the lamp in the front porch, they close the back gate and burn one here too.
Behind the house was a brick yard with a well and a latrine: by the kitchen wall were stone grinding bowls, one for iddly and one for chillies. To the left a little herb and flower garden with flowers for puja (red hibiscus and nadiya vatai, a delicate white flower) and an orange-flowering bush which is twined in women’s hair as a decoration. In the middle is a clump of basil in a little stone pot; this medicinal plant is traditionally kept in every house (as it still is in rural Greece too). ‘We call it the flower of Vishnu,’ said Bharati. ‘We boil up the root for fevers; the juice of the leaves is very good for children if they have a cold and also as medicine; we mix it with lime juice for skin infections.’
To the right through a gate were the remains of an old garden, with an ancient brick-lined well; further on under an arch was a brick and earth yard with a covered colonnade and a threshing platform. Here were the family’s two cows and a calf, which provide them with ghee and milk.
Last of all, in between the yard and the house, there was a narrow storage room about six feet wide and twenty-five feet long. We pushed open the door and went inside. By the door were big sealed jars of this year’s tamarind, red chilli, green dhal and paddy seed. There was a huge wooden tallboy for rice, taller than me, sealed at the top, accessible at the bottom through little trapdoors. Beyond it we climbed over a jumble of disused implements: an old planter’s chair with swivel arms, its wicker bottom gone; discarded home-made wooden toys and a heap of children’s cots. It had the feeling of a kind of memory room for the family; Bharati was visibly moved. Mala joined us, laughing at my obsessive recording of all the details but touched all the same by the sight of these relics of her children’s childhood and her own.
‘Houses have a life,’ said Mala later. ‘They are conceived like a person. When you make a house you have to have an astrologer to give a horoscope, to find the right time, the right alignment, the right soil. You must pray to Mars so that the house is properly grounded and then to Vinayaka; these influence the length of its life, and the life of the people who live in it. Correct performance of rituals helps all this. There is a puja for the laying of the foundation post. When my father’s grandfather built this house, below the threshold he laid nine precious stones, for the nine planets: emerald, ruby, diamond and so on, to give the house wealth and long life. Then they did pujas when the work was finished, all prescribed and supervised by a priest.
‘If you are buying a house which someone else built, you get a horoscope if you can, and also if you are building a new one. When you see a building site with a scarecrow this is not to scare off birds but to keep away bad spirits while it is being built. There was a house built close to Nataraja Talkies where attention was not paid to these things; it was left empty and the family went away. They could never sell it, and it was never rented out; a pawnbroker took the ground floor for his daytime business.
‘You see a house has a personality like a person. Like a marriage, people and house must have compatible horoscopes so that they get on well. When you build a house you ask a Brahmin to name, the auspicious time to start. Houses can be “heartly”, houses can be lonely; auspicious and inauspicious. Certain houses have no companionship. This is an auspicious house, and will stay so, whatever ups and downs happen in the family. We have guarded its personality carefully, so it will stand like a rock.’
‘There is a saying that with some houses, even if Yama the God of Death came to stay, no harm would befall its people. The life of a family can take on this strength. Well, this house is like that; I hope it may live two hundred years or more,’ said Bharati.
Grandmother joined us from the kitchen: ‘No, this was never a lonely house,’ she said with an infectious laugh, which showed a still-splendid set of teeth. She slapped the thickness of the wall as if it were the rump of her favourite cow. ‘Look how thick the walls are; they don’t build houses like this any more. That’s why we have not changed it. It’s an auspicious house, so why change anything?’
Afterwards, at Mala’s insistence, we walked in the darkness to Ananteeswaram, an ancient shrine at the end of a long sandy lane behind Bazaar Street. There were children sitting in the nave doing their homework and a gnarled old Brahmin shuffled over to unlock the inner gate. Mala explained she wished to do a puja for the health of my little daughters. Afterwards she was pensive.
We sat in the forecourt and Bharati told me a story about Mala and Ananteeswaram.
‘When my mother was a little girl, two years old, she was very ill; it was thought she was about to die. She was then the only child. Close to my grandfather’s house in Chidambaram there is a temple, quite a large temple. It is called Ananteeswaram: Ananta is the serpent. My grandfather in his distress prayed there to the god for my mother’s life. He made a vow that if she lived he would make a special puja there every month. Also, that a portion of the income of his lands would be dedicated to Nataraja. He kept this promise. The offering is still made every month. My mother was very close to her father. She was his favourite. But he changed after she married. “How can I live without you?” he said. Now of course my uncle and his wife live with him in the family house. My grandfather has not been helpful financially even though he has seen the situation we are in. Half of his house is separate, and this is rented out to a merchant. When my mother and father were forced to come back to live here when my father went blind, my grandfather offered them to live in his house, but only at rent. Which they could not afford. But in any case they would have refused.’
I said I didn’t understand why they couldn’t live in the grandfather’s house. And why had Mala refused?’
‘Even to rent would be wrong. It is alright for a son to do this, to live in the father’s house. But not for a girl. Once the girl has married, and her father has paid dowry to her husband’s family, she has left. That is that. It is the husband’s responsibility. It is my uncle who will inherit the house. The responsibility now is the husband’s family.’
‘So why can’t they help?’
‘My father’s family have lands in their village and in Sirkali on the way to Vaithisvarancoil. They have a big house with a tiled roof and a very lovely garden, with some old mango trees. But my father’s brother and his wife have cheated him out of his own share. This is the story.
‘The house was an old-fashioned house with a tiled roof, like our grandfather’s. It had a beautiful garden with many flowers and trees, and twenty mango trees, which in season gave abundant fruit of delightful sweetness. After my father married, he left his father’s house and moved with my mother to Pondi, where his work took him. His brother, however, continued to live in the house, and when he married, he stayed in it. The understanding was that they would share it. But when my father lost his sight, his brother got him to sign papers which left him in sole possession. My father was always trusting and did not have a head for business. He did not think his own brother would try to cheat him.
‘When my father went blind and lost his job, he came back to Chidambaram, and asked his brother whether we could also come to live in his family house in Sirkali. His wife, my father’s sister-in-law, said she did not want us there. Even the profit made each year on the sale of the fruit of the mango trees they did not share. All that is left is a separate plot of land on the outskirts of Sirkali on the road to Mayavaram; this is still held jointly and my father will get half when it is finally sold. We feel that my father’s brother must have planned to cheat him of his rightful inheritance from long before. Certainly his wife planned it. At one point they even asked my father to pay the overdue tax on the plot of land when they did not have the money and the land was threatened with confiscation. He is so generous that he did.
‘When they refused to let us come to live in the house, my mother went to see them and she had a stand-up fight with her sister-in-law; in the end she was screaming at her. Now we don’t speak to that side of the family at all. All we want now is that they sell the plot of land, father gets the money which he is owed, and that my parents can move from where they are now to somewhere better. We really want mother and father to come to Madras. But I do not think mother will ever leave Nataraja.’