A TURN IN THE SOUTH - Two geniuses and several centuries in a day

Ramachandra Guha
The Telegraph, August 4

Politics and Play

Although I am not religious, I do greatly enjoy spending time in old temples — and churches and mosques. When I was in Tiruchirapalli (Trichy) recently, and my hosts asked what they could do for me, I asked that I be taken to the Srirangam temple. This is the grandest (and I think oldest) of three temples located on islands in the river Cauvery. I had previously been to the other two (located at Srirangapatnam and Madhyarangam respectively); now I wanted to complete a ‘hat-trick’. Since I had an afternoon flight back to Bangalore, I was picked up after breakfast and driven to the temple. Its gopuram — painted in vivid colours of blue, pink and green — was visible from miles around. My wife, after a visit to Madurai, had come back complaining of the painting of the Meenakshi temple there; clearly, the epidemic was spreading.

My escort told me that it was M.G. Ramachandran who, as chief minister of Tamil Nadu, had sanctioned the funds for the painting of temple gopurams across the state. When we reached Srirangam we found a sign put up by the Sthapathi (temple architect) who had undertaken the decorations — it said that these had been done according to the traditional designs and specifications. This, surely, was not entirely true. The original architects must have used vegetable dyes, while now the stone had been washed with tins and tins of enamel paint. The net result was that one could not really appreciate the beauty of the sculptures on the gopuram. The contrast with the lower walls, which were unpainted, was striking — there, the animals and deities stood out in bold relief.

However, most of the time one is in a temple one looks not upwards but straight or to the left and right. Srirangam is a town unto itself, with several gates to go through and walls to cross before one comes anywhere near the sanctum sanctorum. Although it was a weekday, there were hundreds of worshippers around. Flower-sellers and fruit merchants were doing brisk business. Before we went to the main shrine — which had a sign saying, “Only Hindus are Allowed” — we stopped at the samadhi of the great thinker-reformer, Ramanuja. Here, a group of Iyengar Brahmins were chanting Sanskrit verses, quite beautifully. One hoped that somewhere in the complex there were also the Dalits whom Ramanuja had urged to come and worship there.

My guide had a friend who lived just outside the temple walls. In his home we had some well-made filter coffee, and proceeded to the airport. When we reached we found that the flight I was supposed to take had been cancelled. Since I was due to leave for Jaipur the next day, there was nothing to do but hire a taxi to drive me to Bangalore. It was a hot day (40 degrees, and climbing) and I was told it would take upwards of nine hours to cover the 350 kilometres to my destination.

Resolutely, I settled into my seat and commanded the driver to make a move on. Fortunately, however, this was a part of India I had never seen on the ground. We drove close to the Cauvery, the river to our right, now visible clearly, now hidden by a clump of banana or coconut trees. It was a charming country road, with neem and ficus trees planted along its sides.

At one stage, we passed a large mango orchard. I had been told that it was along the banks of the Cauvery, near Trichy, that one found the best specimens of the mango named Himampasand. This was generally reckoned to be the finest mango in the South, to our region what the Alphonso is to the Konkan coast or the Langra to the Indo-Gangetic plain. But judging by the name — a corruption of “Imam-ki-pasand” — the fruit must originally have come from the North.

As we left the river behind us, the countryside grew less lush. The fact that this was a land home to many faiths was manifest all around — a small temple on a hill, a prayer wall in an open field, a church at the end of a village street. At least in this part of Tamil Nadu, the different religions co-existed more or less harmoniously. One did not read of Hindu-Muslim riots here, or of Christian priests being set upon by young men wielding trishuls.

Tamil Nadu appeared different and distinctive in another respect — the disperal of modern industry. In my home state of Karnataka, factories and warehouses are generally found only in or about large towns such as Bangalore, Hubli and Mangalore. In parts of North India, there are no factories and warehouses at all. But here, in interior Tamil Nadu, industrial enterprises were spread across the landscape. I passed many textile factories, some units manufacturing automotive components, and one poultry farm, which would more appropriately be termed a factory — it had thousands of chickens cooped up in a single enclosure the size of a basketball stadium.

As in some other parts of India, in the middle reaches of the Cauvery watershed, the 21st century co-exists with the 12th and the 13th. Signs of the former were the factories along the road, as also the plentiful (and massive) posters of the Tamil Nadu chief minister, M. Karunanidhi, alongside his son and political heir, M.K. Stalin. The most striking sign of earlier times was the Namakkal fort, which we passed about two hours out of Trichy. While admiring the fort, I phoned my wife, who said that she remembered reading that, as a boy, Srinivasa Ramanujan had liked wandering along its walls. So, in a single day, I had passed through places associated with two geniuses separated by several centuries, but joined by adherence to a common sect (Vaishnavism) and by an (almost) common name — Ramanuja, the medieval preacher, and Ramanujan, the modern mathematician.

One of the joys of driving through the Indian countryside is that signs of history and culture are everywhere. One of the joys of doing this in middle-age is that one can afford to drive or rent a car, thus to look out of the window when one wishes, to stop and look more closely when one wishes that too. (I am not nostalgic for the many long bus journeys I made when I was a boy, when I was confined to an inner seat or to standing, and when I got out only when the bus driver allowed me to.)

I arrived home in Bangalore hot and tired, but happy. The arbitrariness of an airline company had permitted me a privileged peep into a part of India I had never really seen before. The next day I flew on to Jaipur, where, after my talk was done, I hired a car to take me through a very different landscape: arid, treeless, magnificent forts atop hills, temples aplenty but few mosques and absolutely no churches. Nor any factories either. Among the compensations were the clothes on display — what gorgeous colours the Rajasthani men and women wear! (In Srirangam, the saris the women had on were undistinguished, whereas the men wore white dhotis and had their chests bare.) That such different terrains and architectures and cultures and languages and cuisines and cosmologies can yet be part of a single country is, of course, the wonder that is India.

ramguha@vsnl.com