20 February.
Today six banjaras – known to generations of British as ‘brinjarries’ – arrived in Devangeri with three covered wagons and set up shop on the maidan behind this house. These traders criss-cross South India with huge covered wagons drawn by pairs of magnificent Mysore whites, which, according to Hydar Ali, are ‘to all other bullocks as the horses of Arabia are to all other horses’. (In Coorg, where there are no representatives of the equine species, one begins to develop an eye for a good bullock.) Most brinjarries look exceedingly wild, ragged and unkempt but are cheerful, friendly and scrupulously honest. They spend five or six days in each village, exchanging the produce of their land near Mysore for surplus paddy which is eventually transported to areas where it is scarce and dear. When I asked why the Coorgs do not keep their surplus grain, and sell it themselves later on, I was told the cost of arranging transport for small quantities would make the profits not worth while. It is more economic to barter it now for a supply of potatoes, onions and pulses, which will rocket in price during the monsoon.
It does one good to see such institutions still flourishing in 1974. This afternoon I bartered our surplus rice – Tim had presented us with enough to feed twenty Irish people – for potatoes and onions, which have recently become very expensive in the bazaar; and as I watched my little bag being carefully weighed on an antique scales, I remembered a letter written to Bombay by Arthur Wellesley before the Battle of Assaye: ‘The brinjarries are a species of dealers who attend the army with grain and other supplies which they sell in the bazaars. In general, they seek for these supplies which are sold for the cheapest rate and they bring them on their bullocks to the armies … Captain Barclay wrote by my orders to the brinjarry gomashta (agent) … to inform him that all the brinjarries of the Carnatic, Mysore and the ceded districts would be immediately wanted and that they were to load and join the army.’ That was in 1803 and already the brinjarries had become the mainspring of Britain’s military campaigns throughout South and Central India. There was then no issue of army rations and no army service corps; the Maratha and French troops simply lived off the land, looting their way through various regions and naturally not endearing themselves to the inhabitants. So when the British bought their supplies from the brinjarries at current market rates they made a good impression which has lasted to this day in South India.
This evening, as I was reading Rachel’s bedtime story, Ponappa the tailor called – he whose wife died a few weeks ago. I did not at once realise that the poor man had been on the batter and an M.C.C. reduced him to an hour and a half of maudlin lamentations. His main obsession was the humiliating fact that the drugs given to his wife during her last illness had darkened her skin, previously ‘as fair as a European’s’, so that I never saw her ‘looking beautiful like a flowering jasmine’. He anxiously asked if I believed him, and repeatedly asserted that he could never have married a girl ‘with so much darkness on her’. Having given him three mugs of strong black coffee I at last succeeded in gently but firmly guiding him down the ladder – no easy task, by candlelight – and setting him on his homeward path. But I suspect he will have stumbled back to our ‘local’ as soon as my back was turned.
As I write, a group of men and boys are making merry in the courtyard by torchlight: dancing, leaping, singing, shouting, drumming, fluting, horn-blowing – and exhaling such powerful Arak fumes that I shall scarcely need another M.C.C. this evening. They are celebrating, as I suppose Ponappa was, an annual Hindu festival which, being very light-hearted, particularly appeals to Coorgs. The Lord Krishna is supposed to be fast asleep tonight, so petty thieving is allowed by tradition and householders are meant to admit these roving bands who may help themselves to food, drink and small coins. They also play practical jokes on the community, such as throwing something unpalatable (but not polluting) down public wells, felling trees to block roads and filling with water the petrol tanks of buses or motor cars. Subaya very properly says they must not be admitted to this house because the owners are absent, but I suppose I had better go down now to tip them before they waken Rachel. They certainly make a cheerful scene, by the wavering light of unsteadily held plantain-stump torches, but their musicians are rather too far gone to be melodious.
24 February.
Today we were invited to a farewell lunch with the Chengappas in Virajpet and, it being Sunday, I decided to attend Mass in the Roman Catholic church. The large building was packed, mostly with women and children, and everyone sang hymns lustily if untunefully. By far the best feature of the interior was a simple Face-the-People altar of polished teak.
As we left the church we were stopped by a skinny, frail-looking little man of perhaps thirty-five, who had collected the offerings. He asked Rachel her name and then exclaimed, ‘Rachel! That is nice bit of chance! This minute my daughter is to be christened Rachel also, so you must come to watch how she gets her name!’
Turning to follow the proud father into the church, I marvelled that such a fragile creature should have begotten a child. Then we took our place beside the font, where a 40-day-old infant was being held by an elderly woman whom I assumed to be a godmother of granny’s generation. By now most of the congregation had left, though I noticed that one long pew near the font was full of school-children of mixed ages who seemed to be taking a lively interest in the proceedings.
At the end of the twenty-minute ceremony, Rachel II’s father turned to the elderly ‘godmother’ and introduced her as his wife; then he turned to the pewful and introduced it collectively as ‘my other children’.
‘How many?’ I asked weakly, feeling too pole-axed to do my own counting.
‘Thirteen, with Rachel,’ said the skinny little man happily. ‘So now we quickly have another, because thirteen is a bad and misfortunate number.’ He beamed at his haggard wife. ‘Perhaps we shall have the full score, the round twenty – my wife is aged only thirty-four – there is time.’
. . . . .
At the Chengappas Rachel for once said the right thing by remarking that she would like to live here always; and I can quite see why. There is never any fuss about the dangers of motor-traffic, or about getting too hot, too cold or too wet – she can run naked all day through the forest and over the paddy-valleys and in and out of as many streams and ponds as come her way. This morning she was out with friends from eight o’clock until ten-thirty and returned mud to the ears, having obviously had a whale of a time in some buffalo hole. I had to take her to the well and pour several buckets of water over her before she was fit to go out to lunch.
During the meal we discussed the problems of recruiting well-educated Indian girls to the nursing profession, which because of pollution complications is still regarded as fit only for the lowest caste. Mrs Chengappa explained that until living conditions for the student nurses are improved there is little hope of the situation changing. The younger Chengappa daughter’s ambition to be a nurse is supported in theory by her parents; but in practice they feel bound to discourage it because student nurses are not allowed to rent flats and conditions in the hospital hostels would prove intolerable for such a girl. Yet nursing will only become socially acceptable after a pioneering corps of high-caste girls has led the way, so here India has yet another vicious circle.
25 February.
On the third of March we leave Coorg for North India, so we have only six more nights in Devangeri. Coincidentally, on our last evening a torchlight display of Coorg folk-dancing is being staged on the maidan here, as part of the annual Mercara-Darien (Connecticut) get-together, and those jollifications may perhaps lighten that gloom which has already settled on me at the thought of leaving Devangeri. We have been invited to spend the night of the second at the Machiahs, and next morning we catch the Bangalore bus.
Now the midday hours are noticeably hotter – though never uncomfortable, as there is an increasing amount of cloud and breeze. Soon the heavy ‘blossom showers’ of March will come; how I wish we could have stayed to see the plantations being transformed into white oceans of heavily scented blossom, and the grey-brown maidans turning green! These March showers are vitally important for next year’s coffee; if they are inadequate the crop is ruined, however good the later monsoon rains may be. And it is not always easy to get the ripe berries harvested before the showers, which would destroy them, so during the past week we have observed tremendous activity in the plantations.
Rachel had just gone to sleep this evening when an unfamiliar car appeared in the compound and I saw emerging from it one of our Virajpet merchant friends, coming with his wife and two small sons to say good-bye and present us with farewell gifts of sandalwood and expensive Cadbury’s chocolate. Mr Kusum’s father wrote a history of Coorg in Kannada, and in addition to his flourishing general store in Virajpet he owns a printing press in Mercara and is therefore, by Indian reckoning, a publisher.
When I first asked Mr Kusum, ‘To which community do you belong?’ he proudly replied, ‘I am of Indira Gandhi’s community – a Kashmiri Brahman.’ But the family moved from Goa to Coorg eighty years ago and it is many generations since they left Kashmir. They remain, however, strict vegetarians, teetotallers and non-smokers – not easy people to entertain chez Murphy.
Mr Kusum’s account of the status of Indian authors made my hair stand on end. He assured me that an author can hope to make no more than fifteen or twenty pounds sterling on a book that sells 2,000 or 3,000 copies. Moreover, reviewers are paid nothing by the newspapers – the free review copy is their fee – and are therefore open to bribes from authors or the enemies of authors. Probably – added Mr Kusum – the enemies, because by the time the author has paid for the printing of his book, and the paper on which it is printed, he is unlikely to be able to afford a bribe. My professional blood ran cold as the Indian literary scene was thus revealed in all its ghastly detail. No wonder Indians are incredulous when their persistent questioning reveals that I am, (a) a writer and, (b) not given a grant to travel by the Irish Government, a university, a business firm or anyone else. They simply cannot imagine a lowly writer being able to afford to travel abroad.
26 February.
At last week’s wedding the Good Shepherd nuns who were our fellow-guests invited us to their Ammathi school to meet its ancient English founder. This school has over 300 pupils, between the ages of four and thirteen, and it was built and is being run without the government support that was hoped for – which lack of support is interpreted by some as a symptom of official anti-Christian bias. However, the Good Shepherd Order is extremely wealthy in India, where it has been established for over 130 years, and the Coorg families for whom the school caters are well able to pay high fees. The tiny minority of non-fee-paying pupils are ‘deserving cases’ from poor Ammathi families and are presumably admitted as a token gesture, since the Order was founded not to educate the rich but to tend the poor – and especially to reclaim the souls of unmarried mothers and prostitutes.
After touring the well-equipped classrooms I was taken to meet Mother Christine, the 79-year-old English woman who founded the school. Sixty years ago she became a Roman Catholic, to the horror of her peppery old colonel father, and a year later she joined the Good Shepherd Order in Bangalore. Her forefathers had been soldiers in India for almost two centuries and I enjoyed her account of coming to Ammathi at 70 years old, with only one 73-year-old companion, and briskly building a new school of which the local Indian authorities did not really approve. It is beautifully ironical that this archaic flare-up of British Imperialism was in a cause which Mother Christine’s forbears would have abhorred.
By any standards Mother Christine is a memorable personality: a tiny wisp of a woman, hardly up to my shoulder, but still vibrant with energy, intelligence, good humour and determination – and having, at the core of all this, great gentleness, sympathy and wisdom. As we sat drinking endless cups of tea, in a small, sunlit, freshly painted parlour, I again became aware of the difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary attitudes to non-Christians. In theory the Roman Catholic church is one of the most inflexible: in practice the majority of its representatives are conspicuously tolerant and considerate in their relationships with non-Christians.
At noon, when we stood up to leave Mother Christine, she accompanied us on to the balcony, looked at the children erupting from their classrooms and suddenly exclaimed, ‘I love India!’ Then she turned to me and said, ‘Perhaps the hippies are right – perhaps in the future mankind’s spiritual salvation will flow from here. Have you ever thought that this is the most prayerful country in the world?’
27 February.
In the forest near Jagi’s village is an ancient temple to which, for certain festivals, pilgrims come from all over South-West India. I find its special character most attractive; so discreetly does it merge into the landscape that one could walk by without noticing it, but for a massive black Nandi facing the entrance. The oblong structure is crudely built of dark grey stone blocks, unskilfully dressed, and the façade has only a few clumsy carvings of mythological figures, almost erased by time. Such a temple could well be 1,000 years old, or more; no one has the least idea when it was erected, though all agree that it is of extraordinary antiquity. The door is kept locked and only the local Brahman priest, who lives near by, may actually enter the shrine, but yesterday Jagi suggested that I should attend this morning’s puja and then have a farewell breakfast at her house; she added that I would most likely find myself alone with the Brahman, Coorg villagers not being great temple-goers.
We set out early this morning, before the sun had lifted the night mist from the face of Coorg, and walked enchanted through a world all silver and green and filled with bird song – until suddenly, as we approached Jagi’s house, a warm golden light came sliding through the trees to catch the richly blooming poinsettias that line this oni.
I left Rachel with Jagi and continued alone, removing my shoes at the little opening in the low stone wall around the grassy temple compound. As the priest had not yet arrived, Nandi and I were on our own in the shade of giant nellige, peepul, jack-fruit, mango and palm-trees. The sky above those lofty, mingling branches was a clear, fresh, morning blue, criss-crossed by the emerald flashes of parakeets, and the peace of that place was immense.
Then the Brahman appeared: a tall, thin, stooping elderly man, wearing only a lunghi and a forbidding expression. Probably he disapproves of mlecchas within the temple compound – but this, I must stress, is sheer conjecture. Nothing was said or done to make me feel unwelcome. Indeed, so completely was I ignored that at the end of an hour I had begun to doubt the reality of my own existence. Yet I could sympathise with his attitude: in a remote, impersonal way I even found him congenial. Plainly he was a devout man of the gods.
Amidst the hubbub of a big temple, or even of a small temple in a town, all is bewilderment and confusion for the uninitiated, and one cannot quite grasp what is going on. But this morning, alone with the Brahman in the stillness of the forest, I could observe every detail from the moment the sacrificial fire was roused in the little stone hut beside the temple. As I stood by the open door, watching the small flames jumping and lengthening in the half-darkness, I saw them – not too fancifully – as links with the garhapatya fires of the earliest Aryans in India, who had no temples or holy precincts of any kind but lit their sacred fires on some level grassy spot and worshipped joyously under the sky.
All the time murmuring Sanskrit verses – for in the beginning was the Word – the priest took his brass pitcher to the well near Nandi, and fetched water in which to cook his sacrificial rice. While it was simmering he stripped a coconut, half-peeled a few plantains, prepared his camphor dish-lamp and incense-burner, strung a few aromatic garlands of forest flowers, and ground antimony between two stones to make a red paste – symbol of happiness – with which to anoint Shiva, Ganesh, Nandi and the lingam stone that stands under a sacred tree behind the temple.
When he approached the hut door with his laden brass tray I stepped aside, and then followed him to the temple door, which he had opened on his way to the well. Two ancient images loomed within, close to the entrance – the four-armed Shiva, dancing on the prostrate body of the demon of delusion, and Rachel’s beloved elephant-headed, pot-bellied Ganesh, who is Shiva’s son by his consort Parvati, the mountain goddess. Standing at the foot of the half-dozen worn stone steps that led up to the shrine, I was hardly six feet away from the Brahman as he sat cross-legged before his gods and began to perform those rituals that already were old when Christ was born.
Occasionally, in India, the sheer weight of tradition overwhelms and our Western concept of time becomes meaningless – a disturbing and yet exhilarating experience, offering a glimpse of possibilities discounted by logic and modern science, but not by the immemorial intuitions of mankind. And so it was this morning, as I watched the Brahman making his oblations, ringing his bell, wafting incense, presenting garlands, cupping his hands over the flame of the dish-lamp and gravely reciting Sanskrit formulas the exact words of which he may or may not have understood.
I despair of conveying, to those who have never seen it, the eloquent gracefulness of a Hindu priest’s hand-movements as he worships. All his oblations and recitations are accompanied by these intricate, stylised, flowing gestures which symbolically unite him to the object of his worship and are of surpassing beauty. At the end of this morning’s puja, as the Brahman withdrew from the temple – moving past the mleccha with downcast eyes – I could not at once emerge from the state of exaltation into which he had unwittingly drawn me.
2 March.
The Ayyappas had nobly offered to entertain Rachel today, while I got on with sorting and packing and cleaning, but early in the afternoon I heard at the foot of the ladder that choked kind of sobbing which means a child is deeply upset. During a romp with her Harijan friends she had fallen on to a pile of broken stones off a five-foot wall and she is lucky only to have minor cuts on her left upper arm and what looks like a badly sprained right wrist. When I had washed her cuts and read three chapters of Alice as an anaesthetic she said chirpily, ‘Aunty Ayyappa has asked us both to tea so I think we’d better go now’. Which we did, and she skipped ahead of me like a spring lamb. But by the time Dr Chengappa and his family arrived at six o’clock, to supervise the final arrangements for the dance display, her right forearm was perceptibly swollen and the doctor said she should wear a sling.
By sunset all Devangeri had assembled on the maidan. A row of chairs stood ready for the dozen or so Darien guests, who were being driven down from Mercara, and Tim beckoned me to sit beside him; predictably, he is President of the Mercara-Darien Association. He told me that Devangeri is among the few villages in which women’s dancing is being revived. During the pre-Lingayat era Coorg women participated in all community events, dancing at village festivals and joining their menfolk in those lengthy songs which form an important part of the ceremonies at funerals, weddings and Huthri celebrations.
In the centre of the maidan stood the Kuthimbolicha – a tall brass pedestal lamp, around which the dancers circle – and by seven-fifteen the guests had arrived, the lamp had been lit and Rachel was well established on the lap of the most famous of all Coorgs, General K. M. Cariappa, retired Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army. Clearly they had fallen in love at first sight, which then astonished me; later I discovered that the General is famous on three continents as a child-magnet.
There were three groups of dancers and the programme was opened by a score of slim, shy, graceful schoolgirls who performed with great assurance and skill. Next came the women, who have several times been invited to participate in New Delhi’s annual Republic Day celebrations. They dance to the music of a cymbal, chanting gravely as they circle around the flaring lamp – bending, swaying, twisting – and rhythmically they raise and lower their arms while their ornaments tinkle and flash and their silken saris ripple in the torchlight like cascades of colour.
Then appeared the turbanned, barefooted men in their immaculate Kupyas, each armed with his shining sword, ready to dance the renowned and exhausting Balakata – a Coorg war-dance of incalculable antiquity. I was stirred to the depths by these handsome sons of warriors who invoked the war gods while running and pirouetting and flourishing their swords as though about to behead the next man. As the dance progressed everyone became increasingly caught up in the emotion it generated and the circle whirled faster and faster, while swords were flourished more and more boldly, and the dust rose from proudly stamping feet, and dark eyes gleamed beneath gilded turbans. Then the excitement spread and, with typical Coorg spontaneity, many of the crowd surged on to the maidan to give their own performances – including General Cariappa and Rachel, who went stamping and leaping through clouds of dust, hand in hand, beaming at each other and waving gaily in response to the cheers of the delighted crowd. I shall not quickly forget the tall, slim, military figure of the General, contrasting with the small, sturdy, sun-tanned figure of my daughter as they cavorted improbably together by the light of mighty plantain-stump torches – held high, with rosy sparks streaming off them in the night breeze, by a dozen laughing youths on the periphery of the crowd.
An hour later, as we walked with the Machiahs through the silver and black silence of a brilliantly moonlit forest, we could hear behind us the chanting, cheering and cymbal-clashing of the Devangeri villagers who had settled down to an impromptu dancing session that was unlikely to end before dawn.