Chapter VI: Southern India, the Land of Hindoo Temples

A long line of rocks and a white lighthouse in the midst of them--this is the first sight of India as the traveller approaches Tuticorin, after the sea journey from Colombo. He sees the sun glinting from windows of modern buildings, the tall chimney of a factory and trailing pennons of "industrial" smoke. Far to the left, hills faintly visible beyond the shore appear a little darker than the long, low cloud above them. Then what had seemed to be dark rocks become irregular masses of green trees. Colour follows form--the buildings grow red and pink and white, and the pale shore-line a thread of greenish-yellow. The sea near Tuticorin is very shallow, and the steamer anchors at least four miles out, a launch crossing the thick yellow turbid water to take passengers ashore. On nearer view the lighthouse proves to be on a tree-clad spit or island, and to the left instead of the right of the harbour. Near the jetty I saw large cotton-mills, and passed great crowds of ducks (waiting to be shipped to Ceylon), which dappled the {87} roadside as I made my way to the terminus of the South Indian Railway. At first the train passes through a flat sandy country with little grass, but covered with yellow flowering cactus, low prickly shrubs and tall palmyra palms. The shiny cactus and sharp-pointed aloe leaves seemed to reflect the bright blue of the sky, and by contrast a long procession of small yellow-brown sheep looked very dark.

Presently the ground changed to red earth and tillage. Then we passed more aloes and bare sand and a few cotton-fields. A thin stream meandered along the middle of a wide sandy bed, and a line of distant mountains, seen faintly through the shimmery haze of heat, seemed all the while to grow more lovely. Taking more colour as the day advanced they stretched along the horizon like the flat drop-scene of a theatre, abruptly separate from the plain. After passing several lakes like blue eyes in the desert some red sloping hills appeared to make a link in the perspective, and I reached my first stopping-place, the famous Madura.

First I drove to that part of the great temple dedicated to Minachi, Siva's wife, and then to the Sundareswara Temple dedicated to Siva himself under that name.

The typical Dravidian temple, the Southern form of the Hindoo style of architecture, consists of a pyramidal building on a square base divided externally into stories, and containing {88} image, relic or emblem in a central shrine. This Vimana is surrounded at some distance by a wall with great entrance gateways or Gopuras, similar in general design to the central building but rectangular instead of square in plan, and often larger and more richly decorated outside than the Vimana itself. Then there is also the porch of the temple or Mantapam, the tank or Tappakulam, the Choultry or hall of pillars and independent columns or Stambhams, bearing lamps or images.

It was a vast double door some distance in front of me, beyond a series of wide passages and courts, a colossal door larger than those two of wood and iron at the entrance to the Vatican, where the Swiss guards stand in their yellow-slashed uniforms with the halberds of earlier days, doors with no carving save that of worms and weather, but, like the one before me, more impressive by tremendous size and appearance of strength than the bronze gates of Ghiberti. It was a portal for gods over whose unseen toes I, a pygmy, might crane my neck. The vast perspective in front, the sense of possible inclusion of unknown marvels commensurate with such an entrance, a mystery of shadow towards the mighty roof,--all made me stand and wonder, admiring and amazed. Porch succeeded porch, with statues of the gods, sometimes black with the oil of countless libations, sometimes bright {89} and staring with fresh paint. Dirt mingled with magnificence and modern mechanical invention with the beauty of ancient art. Live men moved everywhere among the old, old gods.

Walking along a corridor, astounded at its large grotesque sculptures, I noticed at my elbow two squatting tailors with Singer sewing-machines, buzzing as with the concentrated industry of a hive of bees. I wished that a prick of the finger would send them all to sleep, tailors, priests, mendicants and the quivering petitions of importunate maimed limbs.

Neither Darius nor Alexander, had they been able to march so far, could have seen Madura, for, after all, these temples are not yet so very old, but Buonaparte-- Ah! he of all men should have seen it! I think of him on his white horse, gazing with saturnine inscrutability at the cold waves of carved theogonies surging, tier on tier, up the vast pyramids of the immense gopuras, till the golden roofs of inner gleaming shrines drew him beyond.

Brief--oh how much too brief--was the time permitted me to spend at Madura, for the same night I was to reach Trichinopoly.

I dressed by lamplight and was on the road just at dawn, driving through the poorer quarter of the town. By a white gateway of Moorish design, erected on the occasion of the last royal visit, and still bearing the {90} legend--"Glorious welcome to our future Emperor"--I entered the wide street of the main bazaar at the far end of which the "rock" appeared.

Trichinopoly, inside this gate, is entirely a city of "marked" men, the lower castes, together with the Eurasians and the few European officials living outside its boundaries.

The great bare mass which rises out of the plain to a height of 273 feet above the level of the streets below, was first properly fortified in the sixteenth century, under the great Nayakka dynasty of Madura, by which it was received from the King of Tanjore in exchange for a place called Vallam; and after being the centre of much fighting between native powers and French and English, it passed quietly into the hands of the latter by treaty in 1801.

From the roadway at the foot a series of stone stairways leads to the upper street, which encircles the rock and contains a hall from which other stairways lead up to a landing with a hundred-pillared porch on each side of it. In one of these lay in a corner with their legs in air a number of bamboo horses, life-size dummies, covered with coloured cloths and papers for use in the processions. On a still higher landing I reached the great temple (whither the image of Siva was removed from its former place in a rock-temple at the base of the precipice), which Europeans are forbidden to enter.

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By engaging a man in a long argument with Tambusami as interpreter, about certain images visible as far within as I was able to see from the landing, I managed to rouse a desire to explain rightly, so that he made the expected suggestion and took me twenty yards within the forbidden doorway. Deafening noise of "temple music" filled the air, the most strident being emitted from short and narrow metal trumpets.

Twenty yards within that stone doorway guarded by the authority of Government embodied in official placards fastened on the wall! Shall I divulge the mysteries within? Indeed it would fill too many of these pages to spin from threads of temple twilight a wonder great enough to warrant such exclusion of the uninitiated.

Yet another flight of steps leads up round the outside to a final series roughly cut in the rock itself, rising to the topmost temple of them all, a Ganesh shrine, whence there is a grand view over the town and far surrounding plain.

Among the smaller shrines in the streets the one which seemed to me the most curious--was that of the "Black God, Karapanasami," a wooden club or baluster similar in design to those carved in the hands of stone watchmen at temple gates. Wreathed with flower garlands it leaned against the wall on a stone plinth and was dripping with libation oil. I was told that {92} Karapanasami may be present in anything--a brick, or a bit of stone, or any shapeless piece of wood.

Among the native people, quite apart from the would-be guides who haunt the temples, those who speak a little English seem proud to display their knowledge and ready to volunteer information. Before a statue of Kali in a wayside shrine a boy ventured to say he hoped I would not irritate the goddess, adding, "This god becomes quickly peevish; it is necessary to give her sheep to quiet her."

That afternoon I painted the "Tappakulam" or tank at the base of the great rock with the dainty "Mantapam" or stone porch-temple in the middle of it, working from the box seat of a gharry to be out of the crowd, but their curiosity seemed to be whetted the more, and Tambusami was kept busy in efforts, not always successful, to stop the inquisitive from clambering the sides of the vehicle, which lurched and quivered as each new bare foot tried for purchase on the hub of a wheel.

The dazzling brilliancy of the scene was difficult to realize on canvas, for beyond all other elements of brightness a flock of green parrots flying about the roof sparkled like sun-caught jewels impossible to paint.

The next morning I dressed by lamplight, and it was not yet dawn when Tambusami put {93} up the heavy bars across back and front doorways of my room at the dak bungalow for the safety of our belongings during a day's absence. Old Ratamullah, the very large fat "butler," watched us from his own house a little further back in the enclosure, as in the grey light we started to drive to Srirangam, and before the least ray of colour caught even the top of the Rock we saw a group of women in purple and red robes getting water at a fountain. The large, narrow-necked brass jars gleamed like pale flames, the colour of the words John Milton that shine from the west side of Bow Church in Cheapside.

Outside the houses of prosperous Hindoos I noticed, down upon the red earth, patterns and designs that recalled the "doorstep art" practised by the peasants in many parts of Scotland. The dust of the day's traffic soon obscures the patterns, but at that early hour they had not yet been trodden upon. Brass lamps glimmered in the poorer huts, but we were soon away from Trichinopoly and crossing the long stone bridge over the Cauvery. The river was very wide but by no means full, and scattered with large spaces of bare sand. Over the water little mists like the pale ghosts of a crowd of white snakes curled and twisted in a strange slow dance.

When we had crossed the thirty-two arches of this bridge we were upon the island of Srirangam, {94} on which there is that vast and, it is said, wealthy temple to Vishnu, about which one is always told that its design ought to have been turned inside out, as it becomes less imposing the farther one penetrates within. To me it was one long succession of delights and wonders, and in the freshness of the early morning I found an enjoyment in the crude designs of gods and heroes, freshly painted in strong outline of burnt sienna colour on whitewashed walls, as well as in the older elaborate and sometimes beautiful carvings of pillar and panel, niche and architrave.

Adjoining the so-called hall of a thousand columns a great bamboo scaffolding was being put up for the erection of an annexe roof, to be supported by sixty temporary pillars to make the full complement for the December festival. It was from here that I painted a sketch looking through the great passage, festooned with dry and withered mano leaves, under the White Tower, with a Gopura beyond, mauve in the early morning light. The Ana on one of the temple elephants was very pertinacious in his demands for backsheesh, and his very obedient servant caused me some inconvenience by the way in which the end of his trunk kept appearing between my brushes and palette.

Before driving back to Trichinopoly I stopped to have a good look at the great outer gateway {95} of the temple, a magnificent granite structure of a different style to the rest of the buildings. It gives the appearance of breaking off suddenly at a lower height than its completion would have attained, but its splendid symmetry, its severe contours and its fine proportions stamp it forever as a grand piece of architecture and confute those who speak of the Dravidian style as careless or haphazard in planning.

All that it was possible for me to do in this part of Southern India was to visit a few of the most important temples, and as they are well known and oft described I will not devote much space to them here.

The chief in the Dravidian style after Madura and Trichinopoly is, of course, Tanjore--much earlier in date, being of the fourteenth century, if not much earlier still,--with a pyramidal sikra of thirteen storeys high (it is surmounted by a spiked ornament, which gives its name to the construction), and a stone _Mantapam_ covering the famous Nandi, the colossal stone bull of Siva, which is over 12 feet high and blackened with centuries of oil anointings.

The temple is partly surrounded by the great walls and bastions of the old fort of Tanjore and a wide moat, over which a bridge leads to the gateway. All along the west and north sides of the great open space within the walls runs a colonnade in which are placed, as in a {96} long series of side-chapels, 108 lingams. The walls of these cloister-like recesses are covered with pictures of gods and miracles in sienna red, and on another side of the enclosure is the superbly graceful later shrine, called Subramanya, to the warrior son of Siva. The whole temple is attached to Tanjore Palace and under the control of the Senior Ranee, Her Highness Matosree Jijayeeamba Boyee Sahib.

The huge apartments of the five-storeyed palace are still inhabited by this lady and her sister, also a widow, and a host of dependants. In the courtyard stands a tower which served for many years as an armoury, and still contains the wooden stands and racks used for storing guns. It is a characterless stucco building, and its upper part has been for some time in a dangerous condition; but I was well repaid for the long clamber up its dark narrow stairway by the wide view from the top. In the palace there were durbar halls to see and indifferent oil-paintings of the rajahs and their ministers; but far more interesting than these is the old library, a famous collection including many valuable manuscripts, of which a great number are written on palm leaves. It was here I found, to my delight, the _Elephant Book_. The words are older than the illustrations, and are the writings of a certain rishi about all elephants. When the Hindoo librarian brought {97} out this treasure the daylight was rapidly going, and as I did not wish to see the pictures by lamp-light, he had it carried outside for me and I turned the pages to the sound of music, which was being played under a tree in a corner of the courtyard. In the time of the rishi, elephants had wings, but the sound of their flapping disturbed him when he wanted to rest, and that is why elephants have no wings at all nowadays. In the pages of this book there were painted elephants of every colour imaginable, and a large simple treatment characterised the designs throughout. Some of the pictures made me think of Blake, though they rarely contained human figures, and one of a tree covered with little winged elephants reminded me of Blake's first vision as a child when he saw a fruit tree full of winged cherubs.

Madras I would call the dusty town of interminable distances. Everywhere seems to be miles away from everywhere else, and more liberal space about public buildings was surely never seen. The great desideratum is some kind of gliding shoe which will carry you back and forth at will, without any demands upon the muscles of the leg.

About the middle of the great front is Fort St George, with its three and four-storeyed barracks and officers' bungalows. It is of no strategic importance, but there are very rightly {98} stringent regulations against sketching within its precincts. Thanks to the courtesy of the officers in charge I obtained permission with regard to St Mary's Church where Clive was married, and which claims to be not only the oldest English church in India, but the oldest English building in India of any kind, dating from 25th March 1678, when the first sod was turned for its erection.

I had received a verbal permission from the commanding officer, but had no sooner taken up my position than I was stopped by a sergeant. He insisted on the need for a written permit. Now this involved a second walk of some distance to the commanding officer's house, but I was sufficiently far from any feeling of annoyance to smile at that sergeant, saying I would comply with pleasure, and complimenting him on his zeal. His severe rejoinder was a delicious contrast to the fluent suavity of Eastern politeness. Looking at me sternly with flashing eyes, my compatriot exclaimed:--"Now look 'ere, don't you give me none of your sarcasm neither!"

Most of the public buildings in Madras, such as the Railway Station, the Government Offices and the Law Courts, are of red brick, and their architecture an ingenious mixture of East and West.

Maimed and deformed beggars seem to {99} abound. They come up to you shaking their quivering limbs, showing you sores or touching your arm softly with uncanny hands to draw your eyes to see some monstrous horror of a leg.

I wanted, before leaving the South, to see the Nilgiris, and with this end took train inland to Mettapalaiyam, where I changed on to the narrow gauge railway which climbs one in twelve, a central rack-rail making such an angle possible. As the engine was at the lower end I was able to sit on the extreme front of the train and watch the scenery to advantage. A look-out man by my side stopped the train in one deep cutting as we caught sight of a piece of rock which had fallen from above and lay across the metals in front of us. There were some coolies near at hand, and the obstacle was quickly removed, but it dramatically suggested one of the dangers of mountain railways.

The vegetation was very like that on the journey to Newara Eliya in Ceylon; bamboos, areca-nut palms, plantains and the same little orange-flowered shrub everywhere. Here and there the red earth showed but only rarely for where there were no trees the ground was generally bare grey rock. Hanging in gum trees or eucalyptus I noticed many paper nests of wasps. At Runnymede Station, 4500 feet above sea-level, we were turned into a siding for a {100} down-coming train to pass. This was full of children shouting and cheering loudly, coming away for Christmas holidays from the Lawrence Asylum School at Ootacamund.

As we crossed small bridges over clefts and gorges I could see torrents under my feet between the sleepers; and then, rugged and precipitous, the hillside dropped below on one side and reared up on the other far above our heads, as we crept along some narrow ledge.

At Coonoor, which was, at the time of my visit, still the end of the railway, I shared a two-horse "tonga" with an engineer. He had been for many years making railways in Assam, had been down with dysentery and about to go home on leave when he was asked at Calcutta to get the "Ooty" railway finished, and change of air and a "soft" job had decided him to take the work.

A good linguist, he was fond of the natives generally and especially of the Hindoos. Living for long periods sixty or seventy miles from any white face, he had grown to dislike "society" and hated calling at the private houses of officials. "They don't understand me," he said, "and they never know the native as I know him. At the 'Holi' festival I make holiday with my people. Early in the morning I go into their quarters, right into their houses and throw the red water at their women, and then {101} I have them all up to my camp in parties and they dance to me and all have a royal time. Sometimes it costs me three or four hundred rupees but I enjoy it, and they have few pleasures in their lives. Put a lighted cracker in a Hindoo girl's hand and tell her just when to throw it away, and the delight of it will last her for months. Of course they buy a few fireworks themselves, but they can't afford the big pieces and their joy well repays me. As to the talk of unrest, it's all bunkum,--except among the baboos and a few mischievous priests in their pay. What does the average native know about the partition of Bengal? He knows nothing, as a rule, about political divisions at all, and as for wanting to be ruled by his own people, the last thing in the world he wants is a native judge. He knows well enough what that means--judgment for the side that pays most. No--they get some Western learning, but they don't get made straight. That's one of the reasons why it's impossible to give a native engineer a top post anywhere. He can't resist bribery, and his sense of 'izzat' makes him diddle his employers twice over. After all it is a point of honour with your native not to take a bribe from an Englishman; he regards it as entirely different from taking bribes from his own people. That is his sense of 'izzat,' and to compensate for his loss of personal honour he must make {102} double out of the deal. The other reason is that a native always loses his head in a crisis."

I do not think there was one thing this engineer said, except the last, about which I had not heard the direct opposite from other Englishmen; but he spoke from his own experience as they did, and the various views must be weighed against each other.

"Ooty" was deserted. There were no happy holiday bachelors under canvas tents on the club links, no one at all in the hotels. The place is not unlike Newara Eliya from the scenic point of view as well as the social. There were the same arum lilies growing near the lake.

Living in small huts on the hillside I saw a few Todas, some of the few remaining of those early inhabitants of India allied to the Dravidians, but of Scythian or Mongolian origin. Driven out by the Aryans, in their assumed invasion from Central Asia, the Dravidians and their Mongolian cousins were forced down to Southern India and Ceylon, remaining here and there among the hills. The Todas number only a little over a thousand and are said to be steadily decreasing in numbers. As they are polyandrous, it is indeed surprising that any are left at all. Other tribes surviving from these early peoples are the Bhils, Kols, Ghonds, Santals and Nagas.

"Ooty" is 2000 feet higher than Coonoor, but {103} the finest mountain views are from the latter neighbourhood. I drove back by night and all along the road bullock-carts, with lanterns swinging underneath them, were slowly plodding down with loads of coffee and tea. On the rack-railway there is only passenger traffic, so they have to go all the way to Mettapalaiyam. The drivers were all sound asleep and my "sayce" was on the road pretty often, turning the cattle aside to let us pass. On one side the rocks rose precipitously, and on the other stretched out a vast panorama of hills, clothed in a dress more mystic than white samite, the soft pale clarity of moon-lit mountain air.

It was very late when I reached the railway station, and finding all locked up I slept on the pavement rolled in rug and ulster.

When I awoke at sunrise the Eastern sky was all rose and amber, and in the sharp crisp morning air the bells of the horses jingled gaily as I drove up through the woods above Coonoor, past snug villas now nearly all "to let" for the season does not begin till February. A zigzag road it was, with roses and wild heliotrope along its stone-built sides. The eucalyptus were 50 feet high, rhododendrons with profusion of crimson blossoms grew to large trees, and the graceful star-topped tree-ferns were very tall.

Suddenly rounding a corner of the road a majestic landscape broke upon my sight, rising {104} sheer out of plains which seemed to stretch away to a misty infinity. There was a waterfall above the road, and the horses splashed through a torrent under creepers hanging from bending tree-tops. Then the road crept along a narrow ledge with four or five hundred feet of sheer drop below. I left the carriage to climb to the view-point I wanted, near what is called Lady Canning's Seat, and thence painted the Droog, the hill from the steep summit of which Tippoo Sultan is said to have thrown his prisoners of war. I have seen since other "blue mountains," and it was interesting to compare the rich intensity of the colouring in the Nilgiris with the more violet "bloom" of the gum-clad mountains of Australia, and especially this view of the Droog with Govett's Leap, a scene in New South Wales of similar configuration.

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