A South Indian Journey Read online

  The bus was already jam-packed. The organizer, Mr Ramasamy, was clucking around like a mother hen, with his passenger list in one hand and a large bag of rupees in the other. He and two friends had hired the bus and driver, and organized the whole thing. Mala, as usual, had their measure: with sixty persons at 200 rupees per person she thought they would make 4000-5000 profit out of the whole venture: ‘4500 bus hire, petrol 5000, driver 150 a day. You see, they will make 5000 rupees.’ She wagged her head. And as it turned out, for the wear and tear on his constitution, I thought Mr Ramasamy was welcome to every paise.

  Mr Ramasamy was quite a card. He had a twinkly eye, buck teeth, a big nose, and a shock of greying hair, which always stood on end. He was an infant-school teacher and part-time life assurance salesman. ‘Both these talents are very necessary for conducting a good pilgrimage,’ he assured me. ‘If you are requiring temporary cover I can oblige,’ he grinned. ‘Very reasonable rates.’ Even when waking us up at four the morning he couldn’t resist a joke, and at low points on the journey he would sometimes liven things up by reading out choice quotes from his supply of joke books, the sort of thing you bought on bus-station stalls along with crossword and game books, and movie magazines. He had Good Jokes, Best Jokes, Famous Last Jokes, but his favourite was Aruvai Joks, which, loosely translated, means ‘Lousy Jokes’ of ‘Jokes to Make You Squirm with Embarrassment’. These he would deliver accompanied by loud guffaws, which he would then translate as best he could for the foreigner on the bus. I can’t say I ever became a connoisseur of Tamil humour, but it is gentle, so far as I could tell. Crudity, violence and pornography are eschewed: word play, social jokes and movie jokes are preferred. Sex jokes are fine so long as they are discreet. Most were communicable in any language, mother-in-law jokes, as might be expected, being especially popular among the Tamils. (First man: ‘My mother-in-law is a goddess.’ Second man: ‘You’re lucky, mine’s still alive!’ Mr Ramasamy’s own mother-in-law, by the way, was on board, sitting with his wife two rows back; she took it all with an indulgent smile.)

  ‘We have saved you the place of honour,’ said Mr Ramasamy with a grandiloquent gesture towards the front bench seat, right behind the driver. It would have been churlish to say so, but it was not the best place on the bus. There was no leg room (I am 6 feet 2 inches tall) and most of the seat was already occupied by an extremely fat man who seemed set upon maintaining a vow of silence all the way to Tiruchendur. The first stage of the journey, Mr Ramasamy announced, was to be nine hours non-stop through the night down to Rameshwaram. There was a great buzz of excitement in the air, the women carefully packing their tiffin boxes and spare saris into the luggage racks, the children all wide awake and thrilled with the prospect of the adventure which lay ahead. At last we moved off slowly down East Car Street, with most people still on their feet. By the temple gate more people got on, so it was now standing room only. Mutinous shouts rose from the back. Mr Ramasamy suddenly looked worried, and clapped his hands to get everyone to stand still for a proper count. Messages were shouted out of the window, and a little further on we stopped once more to take on board a dozen folding chairs to put in the aisles. The aisles were now filled up and everyone had a seat. Everyone that is, except a tall and gangling priest, who remained perched on the engine box. Raja was a Dikshithar from the temple; he had come with his friend Ganesh, another priest. Though off duty, both of them were resplendent in their Friday best: white loincloth, Brahmin’s thread, bodies meticulously striped with holy ash, and hair done up in the traditional topknot. Suddenly, with one hand on the overhead rack, Raja vaulted with surprising athleticism over the aisle seats and launched himself on top of me. Ours was a seat for three people, not two, he pointed out. Could the fat man and I kindly make room? Clearly, five days of this was not going to be the most comfortable ride of my life. Still, we were off on pilgrimage, and for everyone else on the bus bodily comfort was the last thing on the mind. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.

  Behind me, sitting with the ladies, their saris glowing in the red night light, Mala grinned at me and wagged her head. ‘You’ll get used to it in no time,’ said Mr Ramasamy as I tried to massage my dead leg. ‘This is a very good bus, the latest model, super de luxe,’ he said showing off the threadbare furnishings and metal seats; ‘very comfortable, no expenses spared.’ He rolled his eyes and guffawed. ‘By the time we reach Tanjore you won’t feel a thing.’

  We set off soon after nine o’clock, careering through the town with our horn blaring. We swept past the bus station and the Nataraja Talkies, swerving on the wrong side of the road round the Gandhi statue, and scattering unwary clientele at the almond milk stall. There were sixty-six of us in a fifty-six-seater bus. On top of that the driver had two assistants. One of them, a doe-eyed youth, seemed to be there simply to keep him awake. The other was the mechanic, and his main job was to keep the video working. He was to spend the next two hours fighting a losing battle with the picture, which kept disintegrating into a blizzard of white static and unbearable noise. Meanwhile tantalizing glimpses of a cool southern night flitted past in our headlights as we headed into the countryside.

  The video bus is a new and popular form of pilgrimage in southern India. You have the spiritual benefit of visiting the sacred places and in between you see your favourite old movies. Unfortunately, in my place of honour, the screen and its speakers were about twelve inches above my head. It was a kind of torture. They stopped twice to try to fix the picture even before we left town, then again on the way to Sirkali and once more after Kumbakonam, obstinately trying to get a steady image. They then gave up until we had a brief night tea stop somewhere after Tanjore, when they finally got it working.

  From 1 a.m. the old MGR movies rolled out. MGR had been the chief minister of Tamil Nadu from 1977 until his death in December 1988, and his face was still everywhere in the state. On political posters, pilgrim stalls and roadside shrines his furry white pillbox hat and dark glasses are as recognizable here as Churchill’s trilby and cigar were once in England. This was a man whom a senior British diplomat once described to me as ‘the most improbable politician I ever met’. But that hadn’t stopped MGR gaining almost god-like status in the south. Among the poor he was credited with virtually miraculous powers. The story of his return from long hospital treatment in the US was famous. MGR had been gone for a year, during which the Tamil land had endured a severe drought. There had even been special pujas for rain held in the big temples, but to no avail. But within hours of his stepping off the plane at Meenambakkam, the skies just opened and every tank in the state was filled to overflowing. MGR evidently employed a good soothsayer (or a good meteorologist – one of the two). There were at least thirty suicides upon the news of his fatal illness, in the manner of religious suicide in the old days. More than two million attended his funeral on Madras marina, the site of which is now a place of pilgrimage.

  Born of a poor Tamil family, MGR had been a movie star through the fifties and sixties, corny old song and dance movies, dramas of mistaken identity, lost twin brothers, wicked stepmothers, poor boys who had made good; movies full of dramatic clashes, pantomime emotion and fat-bottomed dances, all spiced with leering, coy cuddles with young starlets (one of whom was now MGR’s successor as chief minister). During those early years he had been a member of the DMK, the Tamil regional party which stood for Tamil autonomy, atheism and anti-Brahminism, and his films had pushed a sentimental, watered-down version of the DMK ideology, using the party’s symbols and colours on the screen. Justice for the poor, freedom in love for women, defeat for the corrupt, the triumph of the lower castes over the Brahmins – it was all there. Of course this was far from the reality of life for the poor labouring classes from whom MGR drew his fans, and subsequently his political support. But that was the point. His films acted out the fantasies of the ordinary people.

  Cinema was – and still is – the great form of mass entertainment in the south, and films were the chief vehicle
for the political message. Films can turn actors into chief ministers and stars into gods. Even if at the time MGR had no political ambitions (or, come to think of it, divine ones too) he had certainly tailored his image very carefully during his early movie career: unscrupulously, some would say. By the time he was forced to leave the DMK and form his own party, in 1972, his make-believe world had permeated Tamil popular culture. His eleven-year rule from 1977 to 1987, said a recent Indian study of the great man’s career, ‘was one of the darkest periods in the modern history of the state’. Under his aegis, his critics allege, profiteers, liquor barons, real-estate speculators and party magnates made fortunes, while living standards sank among the rural poor, the mainstay of his support. But, like a familiar and much-loved deity, MGR never lost the affection of the Tamil masses and consequently never had to answer the claims of conventional political morality. In the end he remained, an ageing and sick giant, inscrutable behind his dark glasses, surrounded by his soothsayers and courtiers, still disbursing his patronage while the cases piled up by the thousand in the offices of the Madras Corporation, which he had abolished. It was an almost incredible tale, which still rendered many of my friends in Madras speechless with pain and perplexity. When pressed, though, all of them admitted that if MGR had anything, it was charm: from the lowest to the highest, he captivated anyone who met him. ‘He made them happy, even though the truth was the very opposite of what it appeared.’

  Sitting next to me, and still somehow immaculate, Raja had two theories as to why MGR was so loved by the people: ‘First, social themes. He cared for the poor, they called him their father, their brother, their son. They think he loved them. Second, is the way he acted. Watch this fight now.’ I looked up to see what appeared to me to be a rather overweight and ungainly man in advanced middle age send two strapping banditti flying in somersaults across the set. ‘Watch his movement,’ Raja continued. ‘You see? Very good, very strong, no one could beat him. Now here watch the way he dances too; Tamil people love the way MGR dances. Women especially. Many women admired MGR. Including the present chief minister.’ Unbelievable, it all seemed to me. But there it was. Raja watched in approving silence for a while and then gestured once more at the screen: ‘A very clever man. Mr MGR was getting four rupees for every bottle of beer sold in Tamil Nadu.’ Even in a state where alcohol is frowned on by all religious people, and where partial prohibition was in force until recently, this added up to some kickback.

  In the early hours, after two MGR films, they put on the new star Ragini Kanth. Modern stuff full of macho posturing and fighting. ‘This man was a bus conductor before he became a star in films,’ said Raja, who was turning out to be no slouch as a film buff, to add to his skills in Vedic slokas. ‘Actually it was the no. 17 bus in Bangalore. When he became famous he gave a great party for all the conductors and drivers on his old route.’ Ragini Kanth’s film was much more up to date in its pace and cutting, though still brimming with exaggerated fight sequences and dance numbers. ‘He is a good man. Like a child,’ said Raja. ‘We like his sense of humour. He is one of us.’ And indeed, Ragini Kanth’s was an engaging screen presence. One could not help but laugh with him as he let his audience in on his jokes. Ganesh chipped in from his chair in the aisle: ‘Watch this now. He has very good tricks.’ Having wiped the floor with the villain, Ragini Kanth flipped his cigarette up into his mouth, quiffed his hair with his hand and gave a top-sided, quizzical smile to the camera. ‘He is one of us, our brother,’ Ganesh went on. ‘He has fan clubs all over Tamil Nadu; social clubs which support him and do good works. I also belong.’ So the Tamil movie star fan clubs even found their stalwarts amongst the world’s oldest and most exclusive clan of ritual specialists. To Ganesh (should it even occur to him to wonder), there would be nothing strange in that at all.

  The bus charged on through the night. On my right-hand side the fat man kept falling asleep and pushing me against Raja and both of us off the edge of the seat. I gave up trying to sleep and looked around me. We were a mixed bunch: more women than men, some children, Brahmin priests sitting with lower castes, a tax inspector, a schoolteacher, shopkeepers and housewives, a hotel worker. Across the aisle, there was a little girl called Minakshi. She was four years old, with a big smile and huge round dark eyes (like her namesake, the goddess of Madurai). She had come on the pilgrimage with her aunt and her grandmother, who were both very kind to this stranger. Though we had few words between us, they always offered to share their food with me, and better still, to share their feelings. Minakshi’s mother had died in childbirth, and she had been brought up by her mother’s sister, a rather shy, attractive woman who did not yet have children of her own. Minakshi always amazed me by her patience and good humour during the long hours on the bus. She had no seat of her own, and would sit and sleep on her aunt’s knee, or on the wheel box with the driver’s mate, on Raja’s lap, or even my own, in front of the TV screen. Like most Indian children she had the knack of sleeping uncomplaining anywhere – unlike me, I was ashamed to acknowledge.

  And so as the night progressed we all settled down with each other. Behind me, lit by the glow of the video screen, the women in their saris were slumped against each other, the Dikshithars with their elegant hairdos nodding with every bump of the bus. There was no room to fall over; we were so tightly packed that our sleeping heads rested on our neighbours’ shoulders. In the morning Raja’s stripes of ash had left a faint rime on my cheek. No one seemed to need any space, comfort or privacy: only I did, so un-Indian in my desire to find a comfortable position, and a tiny bit of private space. In the end I gave in and ceased to resist as the sleeping fat man slowly lurched over once more and pressed me in fleshy intimacy.

  *

  At six we stopped on a long straight stretch of country road. To the left the sky was streaked with pale mauve behind distant streamers of white cloud. Bleary and stiff, we all piled out, the women off into the bush at the back of the bus, the men to the front. I gulped the fresh breeze. We were near the sea.

  As the dawn rose, the driver switched off the video and put on a sound tape – popular religious songs now, contemporary versions of ancient hymns which were as familiar to the people on the bus as MGR’s movie songs. These were the hymns of the Tamil saints, the wandering singers who travelled the length and breadth of the south between the sixth and the tenth centuries, composing their poems about the Tamil holy places, drunk on the colours and fecundity of the Tamil landscape and the immanent presence of the divine. Their songs are played with a racy beat and jangling guitars now, but still to the immortal tunes which have been handed down for so many centuries: ‘O simple heart, if you seek a good end, go to holy Rameshwaram: find salvation at the temple built with love by the beautiful Ram… simple heart go to holy Rameshwaram’. There are usually no end rhymes in Tamil poetry; it is the elegance of the rhythms and the refinement of the phrasing which Tamils love. Not every word is understandable today, but most are, and most Tamil people will know some of the saints’ hymns off by heart: indeed it is still common to meet people who know the entire collection of the saints’ hymns, the Tevaram. It is, let us say, as if English poetry of the age of Beowulf were still popular fare, and the Hymn of Caedmon as familiar to us now as ‘Jerusalem’.

  Soon we were running along the coast with the sea on the right-hand side. We passed fishing villages as the light came up: reed houses on wicker platforms, the sea around them like white glass with a gentle swell. Across the straits towards Sri Lanka the night boats were bringing in their catch, their stern lamps still glowing. We came to the bridges across to Rameshwaram island: the railway bridge built by the British in 1914 as a strategic link in their Far Eastern empire; the road bridge opened as recently as 1988 by Rajiv Gandhi and named after his mother Indira. Until then pilgrims had come over by ferry as they had done for thousands of years. On the other side is a landscape of sandy scrub, dunes, acacia palms and umbrella trees, dotted with more thatched fishing villages and the picturesque
ruins of old temples and choultries, their colonnades half buried in wind-blown sand. We stopped at the municipal bus park where the sellers of pilgrim knick-knacks were already setting out their stalls and the chai wallahs boiling up their first kettle of the day. We had arrived at one of the four holy cities of India, the southern point of the continent’s sacred geography, ‘Holy Rameshwaram, the temple built on the island by Rama when he bridged the surging ocean’.

  RAMESHWARAM

  On the map the island is shaped like a flying bird, nearly twenty miles down its length, its tail stretching out towards Sri Lanka to which it is almost joined by a string of islands known as Adam’s Bridge – a two-hour crossing by steamer in the old days. The border had been closed now for some time because of the struggles with the Tamil Tigers, in which India had taken the side of the Sri Lankan government against the separatist guerrillas from the Tamil-speaking north of the island – an alliance for which Rajiv Gandhi had paid with his life. Now the straits were crossed by a new kind of smuggler, bringing arms from camps in the mainland, which at that time were covertly tolerated by the DMK government. For a period after Rajiv’s death the disorder even threatened to spread to the Tamil mainland. But all this was far from our thoughts that luminous morning.

  The temple stands on rising ground above a freshwater lake on the northern side of the island, a couple of hundred yards from the seashore. It is one of the great holy sites of India. According to the legend (and in India the truthfulness of legendary history has always been valued more highly than mere historical fact), Rama built the first temple here in expiation of his killing of the demon king Ravana in his invasion of Sri Lanka. The tale comes from the Indian epic, the Ramayana, which was probably composed in the first or second century BC but which, like the Homeric poems, refers back to much earlier historical events. As soon became apparent to me on the bus journey, the Ramayana is a tale which pervades the cultural life of India, just as Homer permeated classical culture for so long in the Mediterranean world. But the Ramayana is more than that, for its stories are common currency from the highest to the lowest in the land. It is probably no exaggeration to say that everyone in India is aware of the tale in some way or other, whether Hindu, Christian, or Muslim; it had a staggering success on TV, where it achieved the biggest ratings ever by any TV programme in the world. Whether in the hands of TV, movies, folk theatre or the traditional village storyteller, it still provides a model for human actions, right and wrong, good and evil. ‘It is applicable for all times and all conditions of life,’ said Mr Subrahmaniam, one of the pilgrims, as we walked across to the town bus stop. ‘Everyone of whatever outlook, caste or education knows the Ramayana and loves wholeheartedly the hero and heroine, Rama and Sita; he is the quintessence of the noble and manly spirit, she the very image of the pure and loyal partner for life.’