11 January. Devangeri.
It is remarkable how easily in Coorg past and present blend together. As we drove this morning to Devangeri, I noticed side by side on the back seat of Dr Chengappa’s car a stethoscope and an ancient, heavy dagger for cracking coconuts. Every Friday morning the doctor goes to his Devangeri Ain Mane (ancestral home) to honour his forefathers by cracking six coconuts before the sacred brass wall-lamp in the prayer-room and ceremoniously spilling the milk while chanting appropriate mantras. Then he returns to his Virajpet clinic to give scores of lucky patients the benefit of his first-rate, up-to-date medical skills: and one is aware of no conflict between his roles as Karavokara and as South Coorg’s most eminent physician.
Dr Chengappa, one of Tim’s oldest friends, is our Devangeri landlord – or rather, our absent host, since no Coorg would accept rent from a stranger. He is tall and handsome, with that air of soldierly authority which marks even those Coorgs who have always been civilians, and he has most generously agreed to let us occupy two rooms in this empty joint-family house four miles north of Virajpet. As soon as I saw the place I knew it was absolutely right for us; Tim has proved himself a man of imaginative understanding by ignoring those who said that foreigners must have running water and electricity.
Three miles from Virajpet the narrow road divides beside a small rice mill and, taking the left fork, one continues for another mile until a dirt track branches off to the right. Following this down a slight slope, between low stone walls and tall tamarinds and palm-trees, one soon comes on a wide, neatly swept expanse of pinkish earth in front of an imposing, two-storeyed, brown-tiled house, freshly painted white, with verdigris pillars, balcony-railings and window-surrounds. On the left, as one approaches, are two solidly built granaries; on the right is the well – some eighty feet deep – and beyond it stand three white-washed thatched huts where the Harijan field-labourers live. Moving around to the side entrance, opposite these huts, one sees roomy stone cattle-sheds and two threshing-floors now overlooked by great glowing ricks of rice-straw. And all around, at a little distance, stand majestic trees that must be centuries old – some bearing enormous, cream-coloured waxen blossoms with a powerful scent which fills the air at dusk.
The house faces east, like all Coorg dwellings, so it is quickly warmed after the cool mountain night and never gets too hot during the tropical afternoon. A long paddy-valley stretches away in front – slightly to the left, as one looks out from the main entrance – and is bounded in the distance by high forested ridges. At this season it is a sheet of pale gold stubble on which cattle may unprofitably graze.
Because of the Coorgs’ emphasis on ancestor-veneration, their ancestral home is also their main temple. Apart from the compulsory return home for Huthri (which applies not only to family members and servants but to any cattle which may be on far-off grazing grounds), the Ain Mane is the scene of every important spiritual and social event in the life of a Coorg. Traditional Ain houses usually stand on a height, overlooking the family’s paddy-fields, and because the majority are invisible from the motor-roads passers-by imagine this countryside to be underpopulated.
The Chengappas’ Ain Mane was built in 1873 and does not exactly follow the traditional pattern. One steps from the portico into a long, high-ceilinged sitting-room, dominated by portrait photographs of splendidly attired ancestors – all good-looking, proud and keen-eyed. Behind is an even longer but windowless dining-room, containing the sacred wall-lamp, and five doors open out of this room, one of them into the kitchen. At the far end, on the right as one enters from the sitting-room, is a steep double ladder-stair. The right-hand ladder leads to another high-ceilinged room, forty feet by fifteen, which was completely empty when we were escorted upstairs by Dr Chengappa and Tim. It is a most splendid apartment, lit by five tall, wide windows which open inward and have occasional panes of red, green and yellow glass mixed with the ‘penny plain’ in no particular order. Outside, the slope of the tiled portico roof is directly below and each window is protected by a row of strong perpendicular iron bars. At the far end of the room from the stairs is a most attractive double door, with what looks like a Georgian fanlight imported direct from Dublin. It leads to our bedroom, which has a decrepit bed in one corner, complete with supports for a mosquito-net, and in another corner a pretty little rosewood revolving bookcase containing a complete set of The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1882. The big arched window also sports several coloured panes – which in Devangeri a century ago must have been the ultimate in status symbols – and the disintegrating cupboard contains numerous bundles of letters addressed to one of the Chengappas and posted in Cambridge in the 1890s. Our ceilings are of wood, our plaster walls have recently been painted a cool shade of turquoise and our earth floors are polished dark red. The whole house is beautifully kept as the family maintains a permanent caretaking staff. At present this consists of a tubercular, pockmarked little man called Subaya, his attractive 18-year-old daughter Shanti and his listless 9-year-old son who is no bigger than Rachel. None of the family speaks English – only Kodagu (the Coorgs’ language), Kannada (the Karnataka State language) and some Hindi (which is totally unlike either Kodagu or Kannada and has an entirely different script).
When Tim and Dr Chengappa had departed Subaya furnished our living-room by carrying upstairs a small table, three wooden camp-chairs and two tiny stools (for kitchen furniture). To reach our latrine and wash-room one goes down the ladder, through the kitchen and out to the compound. But fortunately what I have been referring to as ‘the kitchen’ is really a sort of pantry-cum-dining-room; if it were the true inner sanctum kitchen, where the fire burns and the cooking is done, I could not walk through it without causing a havoc of pollution. The sun-worshipping Coorgs are also, very logically, fire-worshippers, and the kitchen fire is considered sacred. Like the wall-lamp, it is seen as symbolising the power, unity and strength of the family and when a Coorg dies his funeral pyre must be lit with embers from his own kitchen fire.
Here the fire burns in a low mud stove, which has two holes, one behind the other, for saucepans. It is fuelled with long, fairly thin branches which lie on the floor and are pushed farther and farther in as they burn – or are withdrawn, should it be necessary to lower the heat. All this I observed this morning while standing outside the kitchen doorway watching Shanti boiling water to steep Rachel’s foot; and since it is not my intention to use the caretakers as servants (even if they would condescend to serve mlecchas, which seems doubtful), I immediately realised that because of pollution complications I would have to buy myself a little kerosene stove.
It must be frustrating for Rachel not to be able to race around exploring our new home, but with her usual stoicism she has adjusted uncomplainingly to being a semi-invalid and she did not object to being left alone this morning while I went into Virajpet to shop. Dr Chengappa had given me the local bus times (the bus stop is a mile away, where our road joins the Virajpet road at what is called Mill Point), and I decided to catch the eleven o’clock ‘in’ and the one o’clock ‘out’.
Between our house and Mill Point are two long, low, substantial buildings, standing on their own about a furlong apart. These are Devangeri Middle School and Devangeri High School, the former built about seventy years ago by Dr Chengappa’s grandfather, the latter built in 1966 by Dr Chengappa (who paid half the costs) and a group of other Devangeri farmers. The Coorgs have never believed in waiting for some outside authority or central government to provide what they felt they needed; they do it themselves. And you can see this spirit of vigorous independence in the very way they walk and talk and behave.
I did not wait at Mill Point, knowing the bus would stop anywhere to pick me up, but happily no bus appeared. The little road switchbacked through dark green coffee, golden paddy-valleys, grey-brown scrubland and patches of forest. Sometimes I passed a tiled whitewashed house, guarded by plantains and palms, and usually the pale blue mountains were visible, not very far away, against a cobalt sky. Coorg now looks autumnal: the coffee-berries are turning red and in the forest many leaves are tinged pink, yellow, crimson, brown, or orange – though here green always remains the prevailing colour. A fresh breeze blew, a couple of round white clouds drifted south, and the silence was broken only by bird calls and an occasional creaking ox-cart carrying rice to the mill or straw to the market. As I walked along I rejoiced to think that I am no longer merely passing through this glorious region but have become a temporary resident, to whom each curve of the landscape will soon seem familiar.
Virajpet is attractively spread out at the foot of Maletambiran Hill, a prominent mini-mountain visible for miles around. The town’s full name is Virajendrapet; it was founded only in 1792, by Dodda Virarajendra, to commemorate the meeting between himself and General Abercromby during the first campaign against Tippu Sultan in 1791.
A disconcerting Gothic-cum-Baroque Roman Catholic church is visible from afar as one approaches Virajpet. Since its foundation the town has had a colony of several thousand Roman Catholics, most of whom speak Tamil, Malayalam or Konkani. At least the Lingarat rajas were not guilty of religious bigotry and when Tippu Sultan began to persecute his Christian subjects these fled to Coorg and were given a free gift of lands. In his correspondence on this subject with Catholic clergy, the Raja always referred to the Bishop of Bombay as ‘your High Priest’, and under the British the Church lands were registered in the revenue accounts in the name of ‘the Chief God of the Christians’.
My kerosene-stove cost me Rs.10; like most Indian factory-made goods it looks very ill-made but may just last for two months. Sugar is rationed and costs the equivalent of 12 pence per kilo, or 22 pence on the black market; this means that only the rich can afford it, even at the legal price. Other prices per kilo are: dahl 15 pence, coffee 45 pence, mutton 60 pence, honey 40 pence, baker’s bread 16 pence. Small eggs are 3 pence each (I remember they were half an old penny each in North India ten years ago), ground-nut salad-oil is 45 pence per litre, inferior curds are 4 pence per litre and heavily watered milk is 10 pence per litre – and not always obtainable at this season. Only fresh fruit and vegetables remain relatively cheap – for us, though not for the unfortunate Indians – and a kilo of delicious tomatoes cost me only 2½ pence.
I got home soon after three o’clock feeling very arm-weary: again the expected bus had not appeared. Rachel seemed quite unruffled by having been abandoned for over four hours in strange surroundings; I suspect she becomes so involved in her own affairs of the imagination that she fails to notice time passing. As I scrambled up the ladder she said, ‘I like the sounds here’ – and I know exactly what she means. Urban sounds merge into a distressing blur of noise, but each rural sound is separate, distinct and comprehensible – the soft trot of cattle-hooves on dust, the tossing of rice on a wicker tray, the crowing of a cock, the squeaking of the pulley as water is raised from the well, the harsh disputes of parakeets, the shouts of men urging oxen around the threshing-floors, the barking of a dog, the grinding of grain in stone hand-mills, the laughter of children, the thud of a coconut falling – and now, as I write this at 8 p.m., the unearthly howling of jackals.
On the way home from Virajpet I met an elderly gentleman with an old-world manner who introduced himself as Mr P. A. Machiah, the husband of a cousin of Dr Chengappa. Later he and his wife called, to make sure we ‘lack nothing essential’, and I soon realised that we certainly do not lack good neighbours. Mrs Machiah – tall, slim and briskly kind – is such a practised granny that Rachel adored her on sight. She eyed our establishment appraisingly and then said she would lend us a slop-pail, a basin, a jug, a large spoon and two saucepans. I really warmed to this couple, who have invited us to visit them tomorrow. As they were descending the ladder Mr Machiah paused, beamed approvingly up at me and said – ‘Anything in excess of what you need is luxury!’
12 January.
I woke at six-thirty to hear an exotic dawn-chorus of jungle-birds and see a silver sky turning blue behind the trees. A thick mist lay on the paddy-valley and moisture was dripping to the ground like slow rain, from the leaves of the immensely tall palms.
Rachel has become much addicted to bed-tea so I got the stove going and for want of a teapot made an excellent brew in a saucepan, tea-house style. At present milk dilution is my only worry. One expects it to be diluted in India, where a variety of desperate governmental anti-dilution measures have merely provided new and better opportunities for bribery and corruption. But if our suppliers, who live on the edge of the compound, are diluting the Murphy half-litre with unboiled water from the well we may soon be in serious trouble because of Rachel’s refusal to drink boiled milk. I have assured them I will pay the same for a quarter-litre of neat milk as for a half-litre of milk and water, but I fear the watering habit is too ingrained to be eradicated overnight.
Although I might not choose to live permanently without the modest mod. cons. available in my own home, I do positively enjoy a spell of the simple life; one needs it, to keep in touch with what are still the realities of life for the majority of human beings. It is also worthwhile rediscovering how superfluous, though time-saving, most of our possessions are; and it shocks one to realise how much we waste. Here every banana-skin is eagerly devoured by some bony passing cow, and every discarded sheet of newspaper has a use, and every empty tin, bottle or box is treasured.
Rachel is now able to hobble around our rooms at top speed, but until her wound is healed she must avoid infected dust so she rode piggy-back this morning to visit the Machiahs. We were guided by a little old Harijan woman, with teeth that have been broken and blackened by a lifetime of betel chewing, who lives in our compound. She does errands for anybody who will give her a few paise, and Mrs Machiah had instructed her to show us the way.
Crossing the farmyard behind our house we came to the Devangeri maidan, and then to a rough, dusty, hilly track running west for about two miles through paddy, scrub and forest. It forks at a settlement of substantial Muslim cottages, barns and cattle-shelters – Coorg seems to have no slummy shacks or hovels – and turning right here one descends to a level expanse of stubble, beyond which rises a steep ridge. On this stands the Machiahs’ house, surrounded by richly scented rosebushes, many varieties of flowering shrubs, and papaya, orange and supporta trees draped with black pepper and loofah vines. The Machiahs spent most of their working lives in Bombay, where Mr Machiah was a senior railway official, and I have rarely met a couple who are so zestfully enjoying retirement.
While we sat on the veranda, drinking our nimbu pane, Mr Machiah explained the exact significance of the Coorgs’ sacred brass wall-lamps. All important family decisions and events must take place before the lamp and agreements made, or loans given or received in its presence, require no signed document or other formality since it is an unforgivable sin to break a promise to which the lamp has been ‘witness’. In each household the sacred lamp must be lit morning and evening and it is unlucky to say, ‘The lamp has gone out.’ Instead, one says ‘Make the lamp glow more’. The prayer-room should never be defiled in any way, so when passing through it at Devangeri we must always take off our shoes.
Mrs Machiah invited us to stay for lunch, but I made an excuse about having to go to Virajpet as I hope to establish a casual two-way dropping-in relationship, on the Irish pattern. However, we were sent off laden with sun-warm fruit – a colossal papaya, a hand of bananas and a dozen supportas.
Butter and cheese are virtually unknown here, but we have both become enslaved to the fabulous Coorg honey. It tastes, in truth, like a food of the gods – which is not surprising, given the variety of flowering trees from which the local bees operate.
This afternoon, in Virajpet, an enthusiastic young man in the South Coorg Honey Co-operative told me there are more than 16,000 beekeepers in Coorg, where it is the main cottage industry. But he complained that the average production of honey per hive was only ten to fifteen pounds, compared to almost fifty pounds in the United States. ‘Never mind’, said I (who knows nothing whatever of sericulture), ‘perhaps you can’t have both quality and quantity.’
The young man sighed. ‘You think not? Then it is better to have quantity and get more money – don’t you agree?’ And he looked baffled when I replied coldly that I did not.
Already I am being made to feel a part of Devangeri. As I walked home several strangers stopped me to ask how Rachel’s foot is today, and how long we are going to stay here, and why I like Coorg so much. The Coorgs seem always ready to stop for a chat, instead of staring suspiciously, as so many Indians do, or turning away to laugh at one behind their hands.
Tonight I have a sore tooth – the penalty for excessive thrift. I bought the cheapest dahl in the bazaar and it was so lavishly adulterated with fine gravel that I am lucky to have any teeth left. Tomorrow I shall present the rest of the dahl to Shanti, who doubtless is more expert than I at the skilled work of unadulterating grain.
13 January.
An uneventful day, full of beauty and contentment. This morning we went for a three-hour walk through the splendidly untouched forest north of Devangeri and – today being Sunday – passed several huntsmen carrying guns and hoping to go home with a deer, a wild boar or at least a rabbit. I had not thought there were any rabbits in India, but the locals assure me there are. Perhaps they were imported to certain regions by the British. As the Coorgs were never bound by the Indian Arms Act they have remained keen shikaris, which explains the total absence of monkeys in these forests; unlike most Hindus, the Coorgs do not regard monkeys as sacred animals but as crop-destroying pests and good meals.
The few people we met all wanted to know why I was walking briskly towards nowhere in the heat of the day with a large child on my back. When I explained that I was simply walking for fun, to enjoy the landscape, they plainly either disbelieved me or thought I was at an advanced stage of mental decomposition.
On our way home we came on three Ain Manes and, when we investigated these, were of course observed and invited in to drink coffee or nimbu pane. A typical Ain Mane is approached by a long, narrow, winding lane – an oni – cut deep through the reddish soil of a coffee-plantation, with seven-foot-high banks. At the end of this oni are substantial red-tiled cattle-sheds and outbuildings – often two centuries old, yet kept in perfect repair – and then comes a paved threshing-yard with a slim stone pillar in the middle and mango and flame-of-the-forest trees around the edge. Half a dozen stone steps lead up from the yard to a long, deep veranda – the Kayyale – which is reserved for the elders of the family, who gather there to relax, chat, play cards, confer, drink, arrive at decisions and receive guests. Usually the sturdy wooden veranda pillars are lavishly carved with gods, cows, birds, fish, lizards, snakes, elephants and flowers.
The traditional Ain Mane is a handsome, massive, four-winged structure; in far-off days it often served as a fortress, like the Nair houses of Kerala. Half a century ago, before families became so fragmented, it was not uncommon for one Ain house to shelter seventy or eighty people, perhaps representing five generations, while it was normal to have forty or fifty family members living permanently under one roof. Yet the process of fragmentation began long ago, under the Lingayat Rajas, who feared the power of some of the richer and more enterprising families. These Rajas actively encouraged the establishment of separate homes by Coorgs who had come into property through marriage, or who for some reason had had to leave the ancestral nad, and the British presence and the development of coffee plantations accentuated this tendency.
At the first Ain Mane we chanced on, our hostess took us indoors to see the general plan of the house. ‘Indoors’, however, is not quite the right word, for on passing through the heavy, intricately carved main door one is in the Nadu Mane, an enormous square hall open to the sky in the centre, where four pillars stand at the corners of a deep depression in the floor – looking not unlike an empty swimming-pool – which is of great importance during wedding ceremonies. Formerly the Nadu Mane was used as a dormitory by the young unmarried men of the family, and the kitchen, bedrooms for married couples, guest-rooms, children’s rooms and prayer-room all lead off it. Most of the rooms are small, with high, raftered ceilings and beaten earth floors, and though they are kept scrupulously clean their ventilation and lighting are poor.
Each Ain Mane has either a Karona Kala or a Kaimata quite close to the house. The former is a raised earthen platform built around the trunk of a milk-exuding – and therefore revered – tree, and reinforced with stones, rather like the Nepalese porters’ resting places. Here, however, such platforms are for ancestor-veneration and the little shrines built on them face east, sun-worship being so closely interwoven with the Coorgs’ religious life. The Kaimatas seem to be a fairly recent development of these ancient Karona Kalas. They are substantial single-roomed ‘chapels’ dedicated to particular ancestors who died bravely in battle, or otherwise distinguished themselves, and they often contain Islamic-type gravestones though the ancestors in question have usually been cremated and cast upon the waters. Within most Kaimatas crudely carved stones represent the ancestors and on all important occasions a little meat curry, rice and Arak are offered to these on a plantain leaf. There is an annual Day of Propitiation, too – known as Karona Barani – when special offerings of food and liquor are made. And, not content with all this, some families – like the Chengappas – have evolved their own particular forms of Karona-worship, adjusted to the individual characters, noteworthy deeds or possible present needs of their forbears.
We spent the late afternoon sitting in our own backyard, watching the threshers through a haze of golden dust. Nothing could be more primitive than their methods. Each sheaf of paddy is beaten on a long, flat stone, just as a dhobi beats clothes, and as the grain falls to the ground it is swept up with a grass broom and shovelled into a sack. Because of the threshing our yard is more populated these days than it normally would be and we are a marvellous added attraction – something like a side-show at a circus. At all hours people wander up to our apartment to observe the odd habits of foreigners: but they never stay long or handle anything – just study us shyly from the top of the ladder.
To add to the charms of Coorg, there are no insects in this house apart from an occasional house-fly. No mosquitoes, no ants, no fleas, bed-bugs, cockroaches, spiders, lice or weird unnameables such as afflicted me in my Nepal home when I wrote – as I do here – by candlelight, near a broken window. Outside, of course, there are various types of large and vicious ants. Probably the red tree-ants inflict the most excruciating bite. I absently sat on some this morning, while resting in the forest, and as a result I now find it very hard to rest anywhere.
14 January.
The fact that I do not recoil from Coorg’s curiously anglicised atmosphere must be partly owing to the unusual historical process that brought Coorg under the British. It was never subjected to Government of India laws unless these had been made specifically applicable to it and the Raj, having been invited to stay, wisely adopted a policy of ‘Coorg for the Coorgs’ and gave most of the subordinate jobs in the Government Service to the scions of old Coorg families. (The senior posts were of course never open to Indians, however able they might be.) Thus the local British ghost is quite unlike the spirit that lingers in Ooty or Simla, though during the second-half of the nineteenth century the Coorgs enthusiastically adopted the English educational system – not to mention hockey, cricket and whisky.
In the November 1922 issue of Blackwoods, Hilton Brown, an I.C.S. officer, wrote: ‘There is just one disconcerting feature about the Coorgs – their ready willingness to be dominated by the outsider … The Coorg’s profession is all to the contrary, but the fact remains … It is very puzzling, for it is just what one would not expect … The Coorg can think for himself, and he ought to; but very often he won’t.’ I wonder, however, if Mr Brown was altogether right. It is arguable that the Coorgs have a history of being dominated by outsiders not because of any innate tendency to submit but because they have never been able to unite effectively for the good of their country. Up to the beginning of the seventeenth century this tiny region was never ruled by any one dynasty but by numerous princelings and chieftains owing allegiance to bigger outside powers.
My old friend the Gazetteer emphasises the benefits conferred on Coorg by the Raj, yet during the restless 1920s the Coorg Landholders’ Association was formed to demand – unsuccessfully – a greater share in the running of the province. Then in 1940, as part of a Government economy campaign, Coorg became ‘a self-sufficient unit with all the offices located within its territory and was governed by a full-time Chief Commissioner’.
So the scene was set for much post-Independence political agitation in a province where the powerful Coorg minority wished their land to remain ‘a self-sufficient unit’, while many of the less influential non-Coorg majority favoured a merger with Mysore (now Karnataka) State. From March 1952 until November 1956 the province had what was known as a ‘Popular Government’ with a two-man ministry; but ‘popular’ proved a very inappropriate adjective and by 1956 many previously staunch separatists had become so disillusioned by the inefficiency and corruption of their own Coorg politicians that they, too, advised a merger.
However, most Coorgs still bitterly resent their loss of independence; walking into Virajpet this morning I met no less than three men who made a point of telling me what a fine place this once was, when not being manipulated by the bureaucrats of Karnataka for their own ends. One middle-aged man, clad in patched pants and a threadbare shirt, gloomily quoted Abraham Lincoln – ‘You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.’ I do not know how real local grievances are, but one does see many signs of a recent decline in the region’s traditional level of prosperity. For seventeen years the State government has been siphoning off, through taxation, a considerable proportion of Coorg’s income and the Coorgs argue that it is grossly unjust to expect them to prop up the less fortunate areas of Karnataka. At first glance this reluctance to share their wealth seems ungenerous, but at second glance one realises that Lincoln was right. Applied to the vastness of Karnataka State that stream of wealth which would suffice to keep Coorg happy and healthy makes little impression, while its deflection from Coorg has already had perceptible ill-effects.
One is very aware, here in Devangeri, of witnessing a society in transition. This evening Dr Chengappa arrived with his 18-year-old daughter whose duty it was, as the eldest maiden in the family, to initiate the storing of this year’s crop by carrying a basket of paddy on her head from the threshing-yard to the granary. She is an extremely sophisticated young woman who speaks faultless English and, as I sat on a window ledge, looking down at that elegant figure ceremoniously crossing the compound with its unaccustomed burden, I wondered if her daughter will in time do likewise, or if she represents the last generation of tradition-observing Coorgs.
15 January.
We lunched with the Machiahs today and on arrival found Mr Machiah sewing up big sacks of paddy to be sent to his three married sons in Bombay. One daughter-in-law is a Cochin Christian, but the Machiahs seem as fond of her as of the two Coorg girls whom they themselves chose. Although the Coorgs are so proud of being a race apart, they are more socially flexible than most Indians. No doubt they are secretly saddened when their children marry non-Coorgs, but the majority warmly welcome outsiders into their little community. Such marriages are now becoming much commoner and there is a danger that eventually the 80,000 or so Coorgs may lose their identity amidst India’s hundreds of millions.
We had a delicious lunch, cooked by Mrs Machiah, and everything on the table was home-produced: steamed rice, fried chicken, cabbage so cunningly cooked it bore not the slightest resemblance to what we call boiled cabbage, egg and tomato salad, rice bread, crisp, subtly flavoured potato-cakes (these specially prepared to honour the Irish), fruit salad and coffee. Unlike most South Indians, the meat-eating Coorgs do not care for very hot foods and are such good cooks that I foresee my middle-aged spread getting altogether out of control here.
To my annoyance – and to the great glee of all onlookers – the antique well in the compound utterly defeats me so someone else must fill my bucket and keep the great earthen water-pot in the latrine topped up. Because of caste laws, this is a slightly complicated situation. No Harijan can draw water from our well, and no non-Harijan will enter our latrine. So I myself have to top up the latrine container with water drawn by Subaya or Shanti, poured by them into the large brass washroom jar, and transferred by me into the latrine container. It would be only too easy unwittingly to do something dreadfully polluting – like borrowing a cooking vessel from the kitchen – which would involve the family in an elaborate and expensive purification ceremony. One is therefore permanently on the alert, watching out for disapproving glances.
16 January.
I realised today that I have not yet adequately described Devangeri. It is a typical Coorg non-village, consisting of our house – the manor, as it were – the two schools already mentioned and a few score homesteads and thatched labourers’ cottages, scattered over an area of two or three square miles. Behind our house is a long, two-storeyed building with an outside stairs at one gable-end leading up to the local Co-operative Society’s offices and storerooms. The ground floor of this building accommodates the tiny post office – which opens only for brief periods at irregular intervals – and the village tailor’s workshop, and a mini tea-house where card-players gather, and a twilit general store too small to hold more than one customer at a time. Anybody who happens to be expecting a letter saunters along to collect it during the forenoon, or sends a servant to fetch it, and so far I have heard no complaints though the battered and rusted metal box to which one entrusts outgoing mail has been in situ since the reign of Queen Victoria. I buy my kerosene (a litre in an Arak bottle for 1 rupee) from the store: but nothing else, as village hucksters charge at least 20 per cent more than bazaar merchants, and adulterate even such unlikely things as soap and candles – which have probably been adulterated once already, before leaving their respective factories.
At a little distance from the Co-operative building, on the edge of the forest, stands our ‘local’, a ramshackle cottage from which Subaya every morning procures my breakfast litre of palm-toddy – in another Arak bottle – for 50 paise. (Where else, nowadays, could one buy a litre of beer for 2½ pence?) This potation is taken from the toddy-palm at dawn, in an earthenware pot that was attached to the top of the tree by a tapper the previous evening, and it arrives in our room fermenting on the wing, as you might say, with numerous dead ants almost blocking the neck of the bottle. If one neglects to drink it within a few hours it is said to do terrible things to the innards, so at last I have an excuse for drinking beer with my breakfast. It is most refreshing, whitish in colour and with a low yet perceptible alcohol content. The Coorgs think it so health-giving that even elderly female pillars of respectability habitually have a glass (but not, admittedly, a litre) before breakfast.
At all hours of the day, Devangeri’s alcoholics may be seen sitting on benches outside the local, clutching tumblers of neat, potentially lethal, home-distilled Arak. According to sacred Hindu laws the drinking of alcohol is a most grievous sin, for which the orthodox atonement is suicide by drinking boiling spirits – though it seems unlikely that anyone impious enough deliberately to drink alcohol would afterwards feel remorseful enough to take his own life. At all events, the Coorgs have never heeded this prohibition and excessive drinking is undoubtedly their worst collective fault. Often men stagger home at lunchtime, unable to keep upright without assistance, and local reactions to this spectacle remind me very much of Ireland. People are mildly amused, or affectionately chiding, or ribaldly witty, or occasionally slightly impatient – but never critical. (Except of course for the more responsible members of the community, who think about the drunkard’s wife and children.)
I was diverted this evening by the section on Prohibition in the 1965 Coorg Gazetteer. Passages are worth quoting: and the reader should bear in mind that the Prohibition Laws have since been allowed to fall into disuse. ‘It has been laid down in the Constitution as a directive principle of State policy, that the State shall endeavour to bring about Prohibition of the consumption – except for medical purposes – of intoxicating drinks and drugs which are injurious to health. Drink has generally been responsible for the poverty and misery of man, sinking him lower and lower into depths of danger and despair. There is no gainsaying the fact that prohibition is a social as well as an economic necessity and it acts as the fulcrum and force in our economic programme for social amelioration. … Though prohibition was formally inaugurated on the 2nd April 1956, effective enforcement began only on 25th April 1956, leaving reasonable time for consumers to adjust themselves to the new circumstances …’ [And to make Other Arrangements] ‘… Permits for possession and consumption of liquor were issued only in exceptional cases; they were issued to (i) those who were accustomed to take liquor, (ii) non-proprietary clubs for sale to such of their members as held permits and (iii) the church authorities for sacramental purposes … Government have sustained a loss of about twelve lakhs of rupees annually, consequent on the introduction of prohibition in the district … As is to be expected, illicit distillation followed in the wake of prohibition … The incidence of illicit distillery cases was high in the year 1962, 1,846 cases [in tiny Coorg!] having been detected during that year.
‘The introduction of prohibition has already brought a change in the social outlook of the people who were once accustomed to drink. It has brought peace to their homes and enabled them to save money, pay old debts, purchase new clothes, eat better food and lead healthier lives … The general feeling among the public, however, remained that … the prohibition law was contravened on a large scale and the percentage of convictions was very low … it has to be admitted that the number of permits issued appears to be large. Action is being taken to restrict the number, only to deserving cases.’
But alas! for the prohibitionists, those ‘deserving cases’ soon came to form the majority of the population of Coorg, and eventually the whole dotty though well-meaning experiment was tacitly acknowledged to be no more than a breeding ground for bribery and corruption. I daresay something similar would happen if anybody tried to enforce prohibition in Ireland.
Reverting to the Hindu sacred law on alcohol: for years I have wondered why it was so fanatical (by any reckoning, suicide as an atonement is going a bit far), and at Cape Comorin I got a plausible explanation from a splendid old Brahman scholar with whom we watched the sunset. It seems that when the Aryans arrived in India they were confirmed soma addicts, and because they assumed their gods must also enjoy this psychedelic drink they decently fixed them a soma whenever they made a ritual sacrifice. By the end of the Vedic period soma drinking had come to dominate their religious ceremonies and the severity of the anti-alcohol laws was part of a successful attempt to have harmless rhubarb juice substituted for the juice of the extremely dangerous hallucinogenic red-capped mushroom, which is now accepted by most experts as the source of soma. Neat soma is a deadly poison, but blended with honey, milk and water it becomes palatable. Its addicts were evidently not too fussy about flavour since laymen commonly collected for their own consumption the urine of soma-drinking priests.
Virajpet’s post office is the oldest such establishment in Coorg – and looks it. This morning, when I patronised it for the first time, a clerk became excessively agitated at the prospect of having to register four air-mail letters to Ireland, and the unruly behaviour of the crowd around me did nothing to help him regain his composure. It had taken me fifteen minutes to establish myself in a position of negotiation, to the forefront of this crowd, and in order to retain my advantage I had to grip the shelf in front of me very firmly: otherwise I would have been pushed beyond reach and sight of the clerk. Meanwhile he, poor man – looking not unlike a harassed rabbit, behind his wire netting – had to thumb through two grimy volumes, and do intricate calculations on blotting-pads, to enable him to arrive at some plausible conclusion about my letters. While he thus did his duty several of the rowdier members of the crowd yelled abuse at him and demanded to be given 15 paise stamps at once. It was easy to see how their minds were working. They only wanted one stamp each, for which they were clutching the right number of coins in their fists, whereas I wanted to transact an infinitely complicated piece of business which might take hours. (In fact it took precisely forty-three minutes.) To placate them the clerk at intervals pushed a few fifteen paise stamps across the shelf, which naturally encouraged another importunate scrum to form around me. There must have been at least fifty jostling, shouting men on that veranda when suddenly one tall, elderly Coorg appeared and said a few sharp words. Intantly the crowd fell back and was silent, not advancing again until I had finished my business. I do not know who this gentleman was, but there could be no more striking example of the Coorg community – minority though it is – or of the enduringly feudal structure of Coorg society.
17 January.
This morning Rachel suddenly announced ‘I think I’ll be able to walk properly today’ – which she was, though wearing only a sock over the thick bandage on her injured foot.
After lunch we went to the Machiahs in quest of eggs, Mrs Machiah having agreed to become our supplier. But today there were none because during the past few nights a mongoose and a jackal have between them decimated the hen population. Early this morning Mr Machiah shot the jackal and gave it to a local outcaste eccentric who relishes jackal flesh – a rare taste, even among outcastes. It is less easy to eliminate a mongoose, and anyway these pretty little creatures kill so many snakes and rats that they deserve an occasional banquet of chicken. We saw one this afternoon, racing across the path near the Machiahs’ house. The culprit, no doubt.
Today’s domestic excitement was the purchase of twenty large sardines for 1 rupee. I bought them from a ragged youth found sitting on the back doorstep and unmistakably they were fresh, but had I known the wretched things would take an hour and forty minutes to clean I might have felt less enthusiastic. The minute scales proved extremely adhesive, first to their owners and then to everything in the kitchen corner of our living-room. Also, if not gutted very delicately they went to pieces in me ’and, and their multitudinous fins required no less skilful treatment. By the end of that session I had had the simple life and could entirely see the point of buying tinned sardines.
On the whole, however, I am enormously enjoying the rhythm of these Devangeri days. Nothing much happens here, or is ever likely to happen, and if one did not have a lot of reading and writing to do one would no doubt feel bored; but I consider it the ideal life. When I hear Subaya locking up after sunset, and going off to wherever he and his family sleep, I reflect that now it’s just the Murphys and the Chengappa ancestors in residence. And if one can go by the ‘feeling’ of this whole huge silent house, lit only by the two candles flickering on my table, those ancestors are most amiable and welcoming. I am totally unpsychic, and not abnormally suggestible, but in a most curious and pleasing way I am aware of not being quite alone here. The house is companionable: let us leave it at that.
19 January.
This afternoon Mrs Machiah took us to meet cousins of hers who live just up the road but have been away during the past few weeks. The family consists of Lieutenant-Colonel (Rtd., and for some years past a coffee-planter) and Mrs Ayyappa, their 20-year-old daughter Shirley and a 14-year-old son now at school in Ooty. The new Ayyappa bungalow – very handsome, with teak floors and rosewood ceilings – stands beside their old Ain Mane but on a lower level, since no dwelling must overshadow the ancestral home. Mrs Ayyappa is a fanatical gardener who has created – starting from bare ground – what can only be described as a mini-Kew. Both she and Shirley are rather shy and very gentle and we are invited to drop in whenever we feel like it.
As we drank our coffee the talk was of inflation, civil disorder, food-adulteration and the oil-crisis. Colonel Ayyappa showed me a paragraph in today’s Deccan Herald, where India’s Defence Minister, Jagjivan Ram, is quoted as having said, ‘The Indian Penal Code provides the death penalty for murder by physical force or weapons, but those who kill people by adulterating medicines or food go practically untouched. Yet the gravity of the crime is far greater in the latter case and warrants a proportionate penalty.’ Makes one think, as one goes forth into the bazaar with one’s shopping basket. My only real fear is powdered glass in the sugar – a not unusual phenomenon, since some merchants think nothing of poisoning customers if they can thereby rake in a few extra rupees. Several (Hindu) friends have strongly advised me to buy only from Moplah (Muslim) merchants in Virajpet.
This evening, as I read Rachel’s bedtime stories – from The Heroes and The Arabian Nights – it struck me that in future such stories are going to seem much more real to her. Grinding the day’s supply of flour, drawing water from the well, going into the forest to collect firewood to cook the evening meal, fetching bales of cloth home from the bazaar on one’s head, yoking the oxen, shaping and firing bricks to build a new home, hunting for meat, trimming the lamps at sunset, making offerings to the gods – all these are commonplace activities here, though weirder than space travel to Western children of the Technological Age.