8 December. Green Hills, near Virajpet.
This address – sounding so like a stockbroker’s fine detached residence in darkest Surrey – is a typical period aberration on the part of a wealthy Coorg landowner and Cambridge graduate of the early twentieth century.
For some odd reason, now quite forgotten, a Swiss architect designed Green Hills in about 1910, when Tim’s father moved out of the ancestral home. By my humble standards – or, indeed, by normal Coorg standards – it is an imposing mini-palace, full of ebony and teak and rosewood, and silver and ivory and brass, and ancient armour, and swords that were wielded in famous battles, and of course the inevitable, magnificent shikar trophies which Rachel and I find so very off-putting. However, though Tim was one of the most celebrated hunters of his generation, and prided himself on always going into the forests on foot, even he has at last been bitten by the conservation bug. But it may already be too late to save the Coorg tiger.
This morning the Appayyas insisted on providing us with an ancient retainer as escort, which I felt was taking concern for one’s guests a bit far. Obviously none of them could imagine a foreign woman, who spoke only English, being able to find her way unaided from Andanipura to Green Hills – a distance of some thirty miles.
When we changed buses at Mercara I bought today’s Deccan Herald and read: ‘Three Killed in Bus Capsize: A bus proceeding from Coimbatore to Velanthavalam village had more than one hundred passengers at the time of the accident … The driver was reported to have absconded, while the conductor surrendered at the Madukkarai police station.’ Folding up the newspaper I looked around and estimated there were no more than sixty-five people in our forty-four-seater bus, so we seemed likely enough to survive.
The road from Mercara to Green Hills – which is five miles north of the market town of Virajpet – winds through South Coorg, where the landscape is less rugged than in the north but even more beautiful. This whole area – Yedenal Kanad Taluk – is extraordinarily fertile and generally considered the centre of Coorg life. Many leading families live here and Virajpet, though a smaller town than Mercara, is the province’s most important commercial centre.
I find myself automatically using the word ‘province’ when writing of Coorg, though the term is no longer technically correct. Under the British, Coorg was a province – the smallest in India, administered by a commissioner – but now it is merely one of Karnataka’s many districts. However, I may perhaps be allowed this inaccuracy, in view of Coorg’s ‘natural’ – as distinct from political – independence.
The bus put us down at the freshly painted white wooden gates of the Green Hills estate and as we walked up a long drive I could for a moment have believed myself in some quiet corner of England. On either side, green parkland was dotted with handsome trees; near by grazed a few fine horses and a herd of even finer cows, and in the distance, beyond the big house amidst its brilliant abundance of flowers and shrubs, lay the long, uneven line of the Ghats. Their gentle blue contrasted with the vivid, sharp, almost incredible blue of this Coorg sky – a sky such as one would never, it must be admitted, see in England. Nor would one pass there a nursery of orange-tree saplings and baby coffee-bushes, each infant protected by a wicker shield; and the bull would not be a glossy red Sindhi with a splendid hump, nor would the house be surrounded by graceful groves of immensely tall areca-nut and coconut-palms.
We arrived just as lunch was being served on the veranda and Sita introduced us to her mother, her two brothers, various visiting relatives and five dogs including a Great Dane the size of a pony. More relatives will arrive this evening for the Huthri Festival tomorrow.
One has to admire the Coorgs’ devotion to their own customs. Observing the Thimmiah family today, I noticed that when junior members meet their elders they bow respectfully to touch the older person’s knees with the fingertips, which are then pressed to their own forehead and, finally, to their superior’s feet. This form of obeisance takes longer to describe than to carry out: the whole series of gestures is somehow swiftly accomplished in one graceful movement. And it pleases me to see such a tradition maintained, even in the most sophisticated circles.
Huthri literally means ‘new rice crop’ and the festivities go on for about a week. These celebrations are simple – mainly dancing, singing, eating and drinking – but Huthri is greatly looked forward to as the one occasion when nothing short of serious illness prevents every family member from returning to the ancestral home. The central event is the solemn cutting of the first sheaf of paddy by the head of the family. This must be done on the night of a full moon, in either November or December, at a precise moment which has been declared auspicious by the Kanias (astrologers). No one yet knows when the 1973 auspicious moment will be, but tomorrow’s newspapers are expected to publish it. I felt slightly cheated on being told this; an announcement about a ceremony that may well antedate the written word – never mind the printed word – by thousands of years should surely be publicised in some more romantic way than through the newspapers.
A thorough spring-cleaning of every house, outbuilding, yard and garden precedes Huthri, and today all doorways and windows were decorated with festoons of mango and peepul branches and garlands of flowers. The pathways and gateways from the fields to the house must also be decorated with elaborate floral arches, and this afternoon Rachel and I went for a long walk so that none of the busy household would feel it necessary to entertain us.
On our way we explored one of Tim’s big plantations where the coffee-berries were swelling and ripening beneath towering, ancient shade-trees. As coffee-bushes need shade the forests never had to be completely cleared to make way for the plantations and walking through coffee is always a delight; enough trees remain for the insect and bird life to flourish and this afternoon we saw three sensationally large butterflies and several jewel-like birds.
As we were leaving the plantation I happened to notice, in an uncleared patch of forest near the road, one of those primitive non-shrines which seem much more relevant to the religious life of Indian peasants than the ornate, Brahman-dominated temples. A long, flat stone (not a lingam) lay on the ground amidst the tangled roots of a gigantic tree that seemed as old as the earth itself. No attempt had been made to erect even the crudest shelter over this altar-like boulder but many small objects were piled near by and, when my eyes had got used to the perpetual twilight beneath that dense canopy of leaves, I saw the simple pottery votive offerings of people whose ancestors were worshipping thus before ever Brahmanistic Hinduism was heard of. These clumsily made little figures represented elephants, cattle, goats, dogs or pigs and some looked fresh from the fire. We circled the colossal tree under which the stone lay, following a path trodden by countless generations, and I noticed that piles of broken pottery almost covered the complex roots. I wondered then if human sacrifices had ever been made in this appropriate setting. But if once upon a time such rites did take place the victims must have been as happy to die as Christian martyrs, for there is now no stain of terror or brutality on the atmosphere. (In letting my mind run on these morbid lines, I was not being unduly fanciful. Up to the middle of the last century, at Kirindadu and Konincheri villages in near-by Katiednad, a human sacrifice was offered to Bhadra Kali in the June and December of every third year. Then gradually, as the British influence spread, human victims were replaced by animals.)
When I asked Tim about the stone slab in the sacred grove he said – rather surprisingly – that he had never heard of it, but that it could be one of those altars dedicated to the local god Bete-Ayyappa – Lord-father of hunting expeditions – which are found all over Coorg in forests and fields. He added that in honour of this god the Coorgs have reserved a certain tract of forest in each nad which is considered sacred and where no trees may be cut. Despite Coorg’s abundant forest wealth, the indiscriminate felling of trees has always been discouraged and very ancient customs – which have the force of laws – specify which trees should be used for fuel, which for building, which for furniture and so on. It is laid down that only the branches should be cut; nobody has the right to fell a tree unless he has already planted two.
9 December.
By dinner-time last night all the family had assembled for today’s Huthri ceremonies and a more congenial gathering it would be hard to imagine. I am still searching for words to convey exactly what it is that makes the Coorgs seem so endearing. Perhaps I came across a clue to it this morning, when reading an early book on Coorg borrowed from Tim’s library. Some 120 years ago a Swiss missionary – Dr Moegling – wrote of the Coorgs that ‘strangers are received among them and naturalised without difficulty.’ And for the ordinary traveller it is not only heart-warming but flattering to be made to feel immediately at home by people who, though Westernised in many superficial ways, have so far remained emphatically a race apart.
This evening’s ceremonies began at seven-thirty when we were sitting on the veranda sipping our gins or whiskies. Suddenly Sita said, ‘Listen!’ – and we heard the distant beating of drums and clashing of cymbals and the occasional long, solemn note of a horn. As the music drew nearer I moved to sit on the broad wooden parapet at the edge of the veranda, overlooking a level stretch of freshly swept beaten earth – some fifty yards by twenty – on which the Holeyas would dance. These are the labourers who work in the paddy-valleys and many of whose ancestors have been the Holeyas of Tim’s ancestors for centuries.
There was nothing outwardly remarkable about the forty or so men and boys who soon appeared, dressed in everyday clothes and led by a five-man band. At first they seemed rather self-conscious but then something took hold of them – the music? the home-distilled Arak they had been drinking? or simply the Huthri spirit? – and for two hours they danced and chanted like beings possessed by some happy demon. This was a glorious scene, lit by the full moon – slim, agile figures leaping and crouching, and twisting and wriggling, and bounding and swaying in their improvised dances. It was every man for himself, from a turbaned greybeard who must have been well over 70 years old to a chubby, vigorously pirouetting 4-year-old. And overhead the leaves of the tall palms stirred and glinted against a blue velvet sky, while fireworks of every conceivable sort were being let off at frequent intervals by the small boys of the family.
Meanwhile, the menfolk had been taking a purifying bath and dressing in their traditional costume, which is so dignified, attractive and practical that I cannot imagine why they ever abandoned it in favour of Western clothes. The coat – called a kupya, and usually made of thick black cloth – reaches a little below the knees and has a vee-neck, elbow-length sleeves and a scarlet and gold silken tasselled sash. Under it is worn a white shirt and into the sash is tucked a peechekathi or an odikathi, or both. The former is a short, sharp dagger with an ivory handle and a silver and gold ornamental scabbard; the latter is a heavy, curved knife very like the Gurkha kukri. On ceremonial occasions the male Coorg costume must include a peechekathi, attached to the silken sash by a long silver chain decorated with exquisite silver miniatures of all the traditional Coorg weapons. The unique, flat-topped Coorg turban completes this striking outfit and the legs and feet should be left bare; but nowadays almost everybody is hookworm-conscious and wears light sandals. A strong streak of egalitarianism runs through Coorg society and at ceremonial gatherings it is impossible to tell the difference, by their attire, between the poorest farmer and the richest coffee planter.
For Huthri each member of the local community makes his contribution, the potter bringing a new pot, the mat-weaver a new mat, the basket-maker a new basket, the carpenter a new wooden bowl; and at nine-thirty, when we went to the Nellakki Nadubade or inner hall of the house – which amongst the ancestor-revering Coorgs serves as a family chapel – I saw the uses to which these things are put. At one end of the room the sacred brass wall-lamp, now lit, hung from the ceiling at face-level and directly below it the new mat was spread on the floor, touching the wall. On it stood the new basket, containing auspicious bitter-gourd, mango and peepul leaves, and also an old basket containing some of last year’s paddy to welcome this year’s crop. The new earthen pot held flour made from fried boiled rice, and beside it stood small bowls full of milk, honey, sesame and ground coconut. On a three-legged stool was laid the billhook with which Tim would cut the first sheaf, beside a dish-lamp complete with rice, betel leaves and areca nuts.
As we all stood before the wall-lamp Tim invoked the blessing of the god Igguthappa and the Karona (family ancestor), and then each member of the family saluted him in the traditional way and received his blessings. At this point the Koravakara’s wife becomes the most important person in the ceremony and Mrs Thimmiah, bearing the dish-lamp, led us in procession from the house to the fields.
We were preceded by several torch-bearers holding aloft blazing plantain stumps to light our way down the steep slope immediately below the house, and at intervals other stumps wrapped in oil-soaked rags flared beside the pathways, making the blossoms on the flower-bedecked archways glow with a strange, subtle radiance. All the time the tempo of the music was quickening and it reached a crescendo when we stepped from the shadows of the tall coffee-bushes and the paddy came suddenly into view, looking like a wide lake of silver beneath the brilliance of the tropical moon.
The swathes to be ceremonially cut had already been prepared and we approached them by walking in single file along the narrow tops of the dykes. Then Tim looked at his watch, poured milk and honey on the roots of a paddy clump, accepted the billhook from the youth who had been carrying it in a special bamboo container and, to a frenzy of music and exhilarated chanting, cut the first stalks of this year’s harvest. At once a henchman rushed to the edge of the group and fired a single shot into the air to summon Igguthappa – and everyone began an immemorial chant to invoke the god’s blessings on the crop. As I write this is still going on somewhere out in the vast, shadowy courtyard. The words mean ‘Increase, O God!’ and sound like ‘Poli, Poli, Deva! Poli, Poli, Deva!’ Poli’ is said very quickly, while ‘Deva’ is almost drawled.
Next, the Poludu Kuthu (a special wooden vessel) was filled with sheaves and placed on the head of the young man – Tim’s son – who had been chosen for the great honour of carrying it back to the house. Other sheaves were handed to everyone present and I found it deeply moving to walk with the rest towards the threshing-yard holding those cool, dew-wet stalks, which collectively mean so much to some 500 million Indians. It is impossible, against the Coorg background, to think of this ceremony as merely ‘a quaint local custom’ or ‘interesting old superstition’. Perhaps it is no more than that: perhaps all religious ritual everywhere is no more than that – who knows? But, if there is a God, then I think we came close to him tonight as we stood chanting in the moonlight.
Marking the centre of each Coorg threshing-floor is a plain stone pillar about four feet high, around which, for Huthri, an elaborate pattern is drawn on the ground with white chalk. I took off my shoes at this stage, to join in the prayerful procession, and we circled the pillar three times before laying our paddy at its base while Mrs Thimmiah performed another puja. Then we picked the sheaves up again and climbed the steep path through the coffee back to the house, to lay them finally beneath the sacred wall-lamp. Before entering the house the Kuthi-bearer paused on the threshold to have his feet washed by Sita – the unmarried daughter – and to receive from her a drink of milk. He then laid the Kuthi on the mat below the lamp and, after a few moments, several young servants took some of the new paddy to weave it into garlands which were placed on every door-handle and window-latch in the house.
Having saluted his elders and received their blessings the Kuthi-bearer went into the kitchen to mix a dough known as Elakki Puttu. This consists of rice-flour, fried gingelly seeds, bitter-gourd peel, grated coconut, mashed plantain, milk, honey and some tiny pebbles and coins, added for much the same reason as we add foreign objects to our barm bracks or Christmas puddings. I had followed the Kuthi-bearer and I watched as he placed a little dough on six peepul leaves (one for each resident member of the family) and threw the leaves at the ceiling, calling the name of an ancestor at each throw. All the little balls stuck, which means the ancestors are well pleased with their descendants. And so they should be, in this family.
Meanwhile, two wooden trestle tables had been laid with shiny squares of plantain leaf in the Nellakki Nadubade, and Sita was peeling a few grains from the new crop. She added these to a sweet porridge of which she placed a portion on a leaf – with a morsel from each of the seven ceremonial dishes we were about to eat – as an offering to the ancestors, and when we had all taken our seats Tim asked ritualistically, ‘Shall we partake of the new crop?’ We then did so, by eating a little porridge; and I came on a pebble and a coin which means I am to live long and become rich.
I certainly feel rich tonight, though my new wealth has nothing to do with coins. Occasionally the traveller chances on an experience that seems enormously important, even if its significance cannot easily be expressed or explained, and though nothing could be simpler than these Huthri ceremonies I know I shall never forget them. Altogether apart from the feeling engendered – which was so genuinely religious, in its joyous, primitive way – the sheer visual beauty of that paddy-cutting ritual was overwhelming. The Coorgs are a handsome race and all those fine faces, seen in profile against the darkness by the light of flaring torches, made a picture that would have inspired Rembrandt. Nor was there any intrusive twentieth-century detail to spoil the vision of Sita, superb in a Coorg sari of crimson silk, following her mother – a slim figure in silver – as Mrs Thimmiah bore that flickering dish-lamp along the narrow path while the workers’ happy, rhythmic, full-throated chanting went echoing across the valley.
Probably, however, it is a mistake to consider the religious feeling and the visual scene as separate phenomena. Very likely they are interdependent, people responding to the one all the more readily because of the other. The builders of the great cathedrals seem to have known a thing or two about this matter, though my impression is that modern architects understand it only imperfectly. But perhaps thirteenth-century conservatives thought Chartres disgustingly eccentric and irreverent.
10 December
I woke at dawn this morning, despite having been so late to bed, and went for a solitary walk through the early freshness of coffee-plantation, paddy-valley and bird-busy forest. And I wondered, as I walked, what the Huthri festival now means to Westernised Coorgs. More, I suspect, than Christmas now means to many Christians – though one might not think so to see the Thimmiahs lounging about in their jeans and T-shirts while sipping their cocktails, reading their New Yorkers, listening to their stereo Johann Strauss and conversing in their Cambridge English (the first language of the Coorg élite). It interests me that so many Coorgs seem emotionally and intellectually capable of moving from East to West and back again without showing any sign of inner conflict or loss of integrity. This is a facility more usually found in practice amongst Muslims than amongst Hindus, though in theory the Hindu philosophy should be the more conducive to it.
As we sat on the veranda last evening, watching the dancers, I was very conscious of the chasm between Indian landowners and labourers; but later, when we were all in the fields, at the heart of the Huthri ceremonies, I realised that at a certain level there is less of a chasm here than in Europe. Landowners and labourers recognise each other as being equally important, in different ways, and – at least where this family is concerned – are truly united in mutual loyalty and respect.
A Socialist would of course be appalled by the Coorg scene, which is as shamelessly feudal as anything I have ever come across. Tim talks cheerfully about ‘allowing my people to smoke’ or ‘forbidding my people to gamble’ as though democracy died with the City States. On the other hand, in addition to a just wage he gives ‘his people’ generous paddy rations for two meals a day, subsidises their weddings and funerals, pays their medical expenses when they fall ill and has so organised their lives that few of them are ever in debt though throughout India millions of agricultural labourers spend most of their lives in the grip of money-lenders. According to himself, Tim is an ‘average’ Coorg landowner and I would like to be able to believe this. He once stood for parliament, causing the local Congress candidate to lose his deposit, but the wheeling and dealing of politics so disgusted him that he soon left the democratic arena to concentrate on doing his own feudal thing.
Contrary to my usual custom – but not surprisingly – I slept after lunch and woke to hear music in the distance. The bandsmen and singers had returned for a ritual praising of the family, from the founder-ancestor, called the Karona, down to the youngest living grandson, aged three. As I write this (at 10 p.m.) the musicians are still sitting on long benches against the wall in the prayer-room, chanting their strangely moving refrain, while the sacred lamp burns steadily before them. At intervals throughout the evening members of the assembled family went into the prayer-room and sat for a time, listening – and then returned to the veranda to get on with their game of scrabble. Tim has told me that tomorrow the ceremonial Huthri Dance of Seven Nads is to be held near by. He added, sadly, that since the cinema came to Virajpet the locals have been losing interest in their festivals and the quality of both music and dancing has deteriorated. In an effort to encourage the boys to learn from the men, he himself sometimes tours the nads; but even in Coorg mass-entertainment is winning.
Rachel is 5 years old today and despite the inevitable shortage of cards and presents it was a most successful birthday, complete with home-made chocolate cake for tea.
11 December.
This really is superb walking country, with climate to match. I spent most of today on the move: before breakfast with Sita, Rachel and the dogs, after breakfast with Rachel, and after lunch on my own. In all directions little tracks run to and fro and up and down, across the paddy and through the coffee and over the steep slopes. And every turn of every path presents a new combination of the region’s beauties; blue mountains fortifying the horizon, protecting the peace of Coorg: long paddy-valleys lying between the dark green of the forested ridges like magic lakes of gold: wild heliotrope covering the open scrubland like a pale purple mist: neat acres of coffee fringed with lines of slim silver oaks and shaded by trees of an awesome height: and occasional handsome dwellings marked by warm red-brown tiles, gleaming white walls, groves of palms and plantains and cascades of bougainvillaea and poinsettia.
This afternoon, as I walked alone, I thanked Fate for having guided me to Coorg. With a 5-year-old fellow-traveller I cannot seek out those remote areas which most appeal to me and it is rare indeed to find a ‘developed’ region free of brash advertisements, domineering pylons, strident petrol-stations, abundant litter, synthetic building materials and hideously artificial colours. But here, in this ‘finest of the kingdoms of Jambudwipa’ a civilised harmony still exists between landscape and people. So perfectly do the artistry of nature and of man complement each other that one feels miraculously restored to the Garden of Eden, to the world as it was before Eve ate the apple of technology.
At about half past four I overtook several groups of friendly, curious, gracefully robed women who were also on their way to watch the Huthri dancing, due to begin soon on a level expanse of grassy common land. Beneath the solitary, giant sampige tree in the centre of the common, Rachel was awaiting me with a swarm of young friends she had somehow acquired since lunch-time, and she announced that the local Harijans were about to perform an overture to the formal Huthri dances.
Then, on the far side of the common, a quartet of weirdly comic figures came bounding on to the grass. The leader was almost black-skinned, smeared all over with white chalk and naked from the waist up – apart from a battered trilby, an elaborate garland of orange flowers and a blatantly false beard of goat-hair. Around his waist he wore a ragged cotton miniskirt, held in place by a rope from which hung a dozen clanging pewter bells, and he had been kept well topped-up with a Arak during the past several days. He was followed by another man whose huge engaging grin revealed a magnificent mouthful of even white teeth and whose great bush of tangled hair may not have been as verminous as it looked. This character was clad in someone’s cast-off army shorts and had a moth-eaten tiger-skin draped across his ebony torso. Like his friends, he was brandishing a long wooden staff and exuding Arak fumes. The other two performers were tall youths disguised as women and even without knowing the language one soon gathered that this entertainment would not have amused a certain Empress of India.
The adult Coorgs standing under the sampige rather pointedly ignored the Harijans as they gambolled, danced, yelled, sang, leaped high in the air and shook their long staffs. During a mock fight they rolled on the ground feigning mortal injuries (and feigning other things when the young ‘women’ fell beside them), while two small boys played a monotonous yet pleasing melody on long, curved horns. This boisterous, undisciplined clowning went on until the Coorg dancers appeared, forming a dramatic contrast to the Harijans as they crossed the common in a stately double line, their costumes immaculate, their bearing kingly, their movements, when the dancing began, stylised and gracious.
Forty-two men from seven villages were taking part and all carried short bamboo canes with which they duelled ritualistically while dancing in a circle to music provided by the drummers and horn-players. The leading pair wore white, the rest black, and as those handsome men circled rhythmically against a background of mighty trees I reflected that seldom, in the 1970s, is folk dancing performed for fun – not self-consciously, to preserve customs, or cunningly, to please tourists. But my pleasure can never be unalloyed when I chance upon such fragile and doomed links with the past. One knows that before Rachel is grown even Coorg will have opted for that pseudo-culture which ‘kills time’ (grimly significant phrase) but leaves the spirit starving.
Why do some people remain so passionately attached to traditional customs, while others can happily jettison them? The traditionalists, I suppose, are just silly romantic fools – or maybe cowards. It certainly frightens me to think that within my own lifetime customs which had survived for incalculable periods have been discarded in country after country, by race after race. Why should we assume that those links which previously bound the living to the dead are now worthless? It was only a few hours ago, under the sampige tree, that I glimpsed a possible answer to this question.
The dancers were still indefatigably dancing, though the clear evening sky had changed from pale blue to faint apricot, and then to a strange and lovely shade of violet. And suddenly it seemed to me that because our world has been so radically altered within the past half-century many of those things we were bred to value are, quite simply, no longer valuable; in modern society they have no place, they fulfil no function. So they must go, as the leaves in the autumn, leaving us, unprotected, to face the consequences of our own terrifying ingenuity.
Tomorrow we leave for a few weeks in the extreme south and Tim has guaranteed to have some suitably primitive accommodation organised for us on our return to Coorg.