A Place Within (46 page)

Kerala: The Goddess’s Footprint

Everything there is different from what it is with us and excels both in size and beauty. They have no fruit the same as ours, no beast, no bird. This is a consequence of the extreme heat. They have no grain excepting only rice…. All that a human body needs for its living is to be had in profusion and very cheap with the one exception of grain other than rice.

MARCO POLO

The Malabar Coast

Three days later we reached the land of Mulaybar [Malabar], which is the pepper country. It extends for two months’ journey along the coast from Sandabur [Goa] to Kawlam [Quilon]. The road over the whole distance runs beneath the shade of trees, and at every half-mile there is a wooden shed with benches on which all travellers, whether Muslims or infidels, may sit…. On this road…there is not a foot of ground but is cultivated.

IBN BATTUTA (1304–1368)

T
HE VEGETATION IS GLORIOUSLY TROPICAL
and the sea is never far off in Kerala. The people are polite and reserved—proud, is their own description—and the houses are beautifully painted in shades of blue, green, and pink, many of them with the traditional red-tiled sloping roofs. There is a sense of the small here, and a slower pace, yet any shopping area in the evening is as busy and noisy as anywhere else in the country. In the capital, Trivandrum, prominently facing each other at a busy intersection next to the university stand a mosque, a temple, and a church, a coexistence that is emblematic of the state’s cordial diversity. It is pointed out to me with a barely suppressed pride. At the beach, fishermen and-women, of strikingly beautiful and unusual dark brown complexion, sell their catch next to their boats; groups of men play cards further away; and women sell tea under an ancient stone pavilion once used by the royal family. A persistent rolling sound on a busy street suggests to me balls or some other soft objects bouncing about in a closed box; when I inquire, it is identified for me, much
to my embarrassment, as a voice on a loudspeaker reciting lottery numbers in a musical, typically southern voice. It all feels wonderfully foreign, yet, equally wonderfully, not quite so. This is still India.

Elsewhere in India, in the north, it is the people and language, the sight and sound of a place—a residential neighbourhood in Delhi or a street in Jamnagar—that have reminded me of the East Africa of my childhood. Here, it is the balmy salty air and the trees: the groves of coconut palms waving in the breeze, the banana stands, the mango giving shade to a house. Standing at the beach I cannot help but throw a glance out across the ocean, half expecting that other homeland to loom distantly in the mist. It was from there that the first European had arrived at this shore in India, brought across the ocean by two Indian guides soon after Columbus’s blunder and discovery of America. And speaking of people and distant connections, I’ve realized after coming to Kerala that some of the Indian teachers at my school—a string of Thomases, Johns, and others—were in fact Keralan Christians.

They say of Kerala that it’s the gods’—and perhaps also, for the monotheists, God’s—country, and they boast a 100 per cent literacy rate. Book and magazine stores abound, selling mostly Malayalam literature, which is impressive. The communists are often in power, but there is a free economy, and during my later visits the effects of the current economic boom are evident. Among the newly affluent, I am told, weddings can draw two thousand or more guests, and the gold passing hands is measured in kilos. The dowry custom persists among all the three major religious groups. There are churches everywhere, though the recent upsurge of Christian evangelism is a cause of some resentment. The population is 21 per cent Christians, 25 per cent Muslims, and the rest Hindus. During my first trip, a nationwide leftist student congress was in progress and there were the red flags and banners of protest everywhere on the main highway leading out of Trivandrum. As I write this, in Cochin, some two thousand Christian college students have gathered out-
side my hotel to protest a contentious government measure. They include both men and women, some chanting, many bearing flags, and all shepherded by their teachers, priests and nuns in cassocks and habits. This is a highly politicized state, and that goes with the literacy. At such a rally the typical Keralan reserve seems to yield a little.

The thin stretch of palm-fringed land along the Arabian Sea in the southwest called Kerala forms but 1 per cent of India’s land mass. To the east, on the other side of the Western Ghats, lies Tamil Nadu, with which it shares a common ancient Dravidian past. The region of Kerala comprised in ancient times a number of small independent kingdoms that were all part of a larger South Indian Dravidian culture. The name itself (pronounced “Kair-al-ah” by the natives) means, according to one version of its origin, the land of the coconut. Another version has the region named after the Cheras, kings who ruled this narrow strip in ancient times, from a few centuries
BC
to the ninth century. The early history of that rule is cloaked in legend. In later centuries, the southern kingdoms on the coast were consolidated into Travancore, its capital Trivandrum; to its north was another kingdom, Cochin, and further north, Malabar, which included the cities of Calicut and Canganore. By the time the British ruled India, Travancore and Cochin had joined the ranks of the Indian princely states—ruled by local dynasties but under British protection and dominance—and Malabar was part of the Madras Presidency, ruled directly by the East India Company, and later the British government. Kerala obtained statehood in its present political and geographic form in 1956, made up essentially of these three territories.

Kerala’s language, Malayalam, like Tamil, is Dravidian, and at first encounter sounds as different from the North Indian family of languages as Swahili. But its vocabulary is heavily influenced by the northern Sanskrit, and it takes only a little tutoring to discern
the Sanskrit-based words: puram (pura), dasan (dasa), thiru (shree). Malayalam and Tamil have similar-looking scripts, both from the same family as Devanagari, in which Hindi and related northern languages are written, though this is far from obvious to the uninitiated eye. The ancient Brahminism of the Aryan Vedas was native to the north of the subcontinent and did not penetrate much to the south. Jainism and Buddhism both thrived here in ancient times, believed to have arrived from the north in the third century
BC
during the period of the Maurya empire, which extended all across India except a small portion at the southernmost tip. Statues of Jain Tirthankaras and the Buddha continue to be discovered to this day in rural areas of Kerala, sometimes standing in for Hindu deities. Hinduism arrived with the emigration of Brahmins from the north. It was in the eighth century
AD
that it properly took hold, and by the ninth century the other two faiths had almost vanished from the land. Many of the old Hindu temples are believed to have been Jain and Buddhist in origin. The great synthesizer of Hindu philosophy, Shankaracharya, was born in Kerala, though presumably of northern ancestry.

Facing the Arabian Sea in the west, Kerala has since ancient times had seafaring contact with other lands across the ocean—Greece, Rome, Arabia, and China. From the fifteenth century onwards, the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, in that order, successfully rounding the formidable Cape of Good Hope at Africa’s tip, arrived on its shores and dominated the region. Islam had already arrived by the eighth century, brought soon after the death of Muhammad by the Arab merchants already trading on the coast, at a time when, interestingly, Hinduism was still taking hold. Thus the advent of Islam in Kerala is remarkably different from its arrival in northern India. Sufism, though present, was never a big force as it was in the north.

Christianity, according to legend, was brought by the Apostle Saint Thomas, who landed in 52
AD
, near the town of Muziris; in
the fourth century arrived a group of Christians from Syria, giving rise to the distinct group of Syrian Christians of Kerala. There is a tiny community of Jews left in Kerala; they could have come here very early, and travellers through the centuries have commented on the existence of Jewish communities, but details of their arrival vary. The synagogue in Cochin is from the sixteenth century.

This unusual provenance of its several faiths—Christianity and Judaism predating Hinduism proper, an Arab presence predating the advent of Islam—and the arrival of diverse peoples upon its shores must surely have contributed to the more accepting attitude among the Keralans. For one thing, there is no single villain to easily point to. Indeed for many southerners it is the northerners who are the villains. The communal strifes of the north, therefore, do not hit Kerala with the same savagery, if they do at all. On the other hand, the viciousness of Kerala’s traditional caste system has been noted in the past by many travellers. The great reformer Vivekananda, passing through the region in the early twentieth century, called it a “madhouse of caste.”

Immediately after my arrival in Trivandrum, once, I receive a phone call in my room. A very warm and rich voice welcomes me with familiarity. It is the doyen of Malayali literature, K. Ayyappa Paniker. A little more than a year ago, upon hearing that I edited a literary magazine, he called me from Boston and told me about the Oriya poet Jayanta Mahapatra. Since then I have had the opportunity to visit Mahapatra at his home, and met a man as graceful as his sinuously beautiful poetry, which I published, along with an article by Paniker on the great Malayali novelist Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai. I meet Paniker the following day at his office. He has recently retired from the local university and is compiling a Malayali contribution to a national project on the Indian literatures. He is a short
dark man with a milk-white beard and a wide toothy grin, and surprisingly (I was expecting a South Indian professor in a grey suit) is attired in a black shirt over a traditional white dhoti, with slippers. He has a wonderfully understated humour, delivered in his low voice and easy manner of speech, keeping me on constant guard against his meanings. (Complaining about Indian typesetters: “If they can’t find a letter, they will substitute another…after all, there are all of twenty-six letters to choose from.”) Tongue always in cheek, eyes twinkling, and a mysterious man, too, difficult to know even after several meetings. A Keralan trait. It takes me some years to discover that this man, who looks like a pilgrim, completed his graduate work in the United States, in Indiana, and is a modernist poet in English of no mean stature. And yet he is constantly promoting other writers, never attempts to press his own publications upon me, a tendency very much present in the north. He has a much younger, though not very glamorous-looking, woman assisting him on his project, the mention of whom brings smiles of tolerant understanding among his admirers. During one of my visits he invites me to see his village in the famous Kerala backwaters, and to meet Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, who comes from the same area as he does.

My guide in Trivandrum is Hussein, who first brought me on a two-day train journey across the subcontinent to this city on my first visit. He is a student of Michael Ondaatje, who, he is convinced, has based one of his books on the life of the playback singer Muhammad Rafi. His one ambition is to make it to Canada on one of those fellowships that entice scholars to study Canada. One has the impression with him of a life burdened by a limited village background, a traditional family, and responsibility for growing children, with an underpaid job in a drab college in a small town. But he has this one ambition for a shot at excitement and freedom, to elaborate his thesis on Ondaatje’s book while
visiting faraway Canada—to rise above his poor Muslim background just this once and be somebody in the wide world. The contrast between him and the better-placed academics from wealthier backgrounds is touching.

Buses blaring their horns, grinding their way along highways that were streets once, through towns that were villages, racing back and forth past each other. Even over long distances it’s standing room only, and more difficult getting off than getting on, because you work against a clamouring incoming tide. One understands overpopulation in such a setting—town upon town thronged with people. Poor fishing villages with large new structures built with Gulf money from émigrés working abroad—mosques, houses, a brick factory along the beach. New Muslim houses tend to use arches where they can, and sometimes boast a decorative crescent and star; Hindu houses seem more square. These are pointed out to me by Hussein on our way to Allepey from Varkala, the urban centre near his village. We pass a village that seems more together than most, more residential, less split apart by the highway and attendant business; less crowded. Here, my friend tells me, the Muslims have a matrilineal system; their neighbours are Nairs, who traditionally have the same system. The Muslims must have converted, I say. He is reluctant to admit that, says they just copied their neighbours. I point out to him that Muslims don’t drop fully formed from the sky, they grow from the same soil.