Although Kerala was the neighbouring state I only went there once during the several years I spent living in Tamil Nadu. But in 1984, encouraged by our friends Tharyan and Elizabeth Matthews who were originally from Kerala, Michael and I took a short holiday. The parallels then between Kerala in the Southwest and Bengal at the other end of India in the Northeast were amusing. At the time, these were the two most literate states in India, the only ones whose state governments were communist (in its idiosyncratic Indian form) and the only two that played football to any significant degree. Is there a connection? Michael had a story about an English lady from back in the days of the Raj who imperiously pronounced that “the education of the Indians will be the downfall of India.” Maybe she meant British India but perhaps she meant something along the lines of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing hence the possible connection between high literacy and communism. She was wrong but she was also right. Education can be a two-edged sword.
We went first to Cochin (now Kochi but I will call it by the name I knew) where we stayed in a hotel recommended by Tharyan. This was on a small island that was gained by a narrow footbridge. The original building was from the colonial era and had been constructed by Dutch traders in the 18th century. When I was there it was a mixture of the grand and the rundown as was quite common with old and past their best hotels in third world countries in the period before mass tourism. I must say I rather liked the atmosphere that combined faded grandeur with slight seediness which was lost when the moneymen moved in and did these hotels up to suit modern tastes and demands for luxuries like hot water. They would become more comfortable but less characterful.
When the hotel staff showed us to our room, they apologised that there was no soap in the bathroom because the rats had eaten it. I bet you don’t get those little extra touches now.
Kerala was the first place Europeans came to when they discovered India and opened up trading routes, particularly for spices. To begin with it was the Portuguese explorers with Vasco de Gama in 1498, and then the Dutch who captured the Portuguese port at Cochin in 1633. The Dutch were followed by the British East India Company in the 18th century, and all these nations left their mark. But you can go even further back. St Thomas of doubting Thomas fame taught here before being martyred in Tamil Nadu. The Arabs arrived, again for trading, in the 9th century, and Jews even earlier. The famous Cochin synagogue was built in 1568 but Jews had been around for hundreds of years before that. Some are even supposed to have been sent there as merchants by King Solomon.
Perhaps because of all this multicultural influence I found Cochin less interesting than some other Indian towns and cities. It seemed marked by its mercantile past and lacked the more uniquely Indian qualities to be found elsewhere. For me, at any rate. On the plus side, its network of backwaters and canals and its scenic position on the shores of the Arabian Sea with ten islands all connected by a busy water transport system, gave it its own unique charm.
From Cochin we went by bus to the Periyar National Park and wildlife sanctuary. When we arrived at the state government run lodge located on the shores of the Periyar Lake we saw some wildlife almost immediately. While waiting to register at reception I was sitting on a bench from where I could see into the kitchen as the door had been left open. Suddenly there was a loud commotion and some shouting. A long dark brown shape ran out of the kitchen. Including the substantial tail, it was a good 3 feet long and it was going fast. Two members of the kitchen staff were pursuing it waving knives. It was coming straight towards me and obviously had no intention of changing direction so I decided the prudent option would be to lift my legs up high which I did just in time for it to run right under me and then out through the door into the surrounding jungle. “Welcome to Periyar” said the receptionist, seemingly unironically. By this time, I knew India well enough to take this sort of thing in my stride though, while I had seen plenty of rats before, I had never seen the much larger bandicoot which is what this creature was. Bandicoots are known for their aggression, and this one certainly had a mean look as it raced towards my sandalled, and therefore vulnerable, feet.
The next morning we rose before dawn so as to go out on the lake to watch the animals come down from the surrounding hills for their early morning drink. Periyar is located in the Yela Mala or Cardamon Hills at the base of the Western Ghats on the border with Tamil Nadu and it was known at the time as a good place to see tigers and elephants. The sanctuary is centred on the lake which was formed when a dam was constructed in the late 19th century though it now seems completely natural. It’s an ideal position from which to view animals without disturbing them as they come to the shore to drink, and dawn and dusk are the best times to do this. As we set off in the small boat with around half a dozen other people we were told that there were roughly 30 tigers currently in the sanctuary though the exact figure was not known. This compares to around 4,000 in the whole of India at that time which was a drastic reduction from 1947 when estimates suggest there were 40,000 tigers in the country. But even that figure was a big drop from the number at the turn of the century. Hunting and poaching had decimated the population and even someone like me who believes that the British colonisation of India was on the whole beneficial to the country must condemn the rampant destruction caused by hunting. The numbers after 1984 continued to fall, collapsing to 1,411 in 2006 when there was the first strictly scientific count, but conservation measures including habitat restoration have helped revive the tiger population somewhat even if there is still a long way to go. It would be a tragedy if the tiger died out in India, but everyone knows that. The tiger seems to symbolise India in a way I cannot think any other animal does for any other country.
The sun had just come up and the boat moved quietly through the water with a gentle swish, allowing us to hear the sounds of the jungle, soft bird song and the occasional grunt, howl and sharp cry. As the lake had been formed by flooding lower ground when the dam was built there were still the remains of submerged trees sticking up out of the water, giving the scene a slightly desolate appearance in parts. But then birds such the storks in this picture perched on these trees bringing them back to life. Elsewhere we saw parakeets and hornbills but there was no sight of animals at first because the area we were going through was thickly wooded.
photo by Bernard Gagnon
Then we came to a more open space where forest gave way to grassland and saw a herd of gaur, the large Indian bison that had so impressed me when we came upon a solitary bull in the jungle at Mudumalai. These were further away than that close encounter but there were several of them grazing by the water’s edge including some calves, so it was a different sort of experience, less intense, certainly, but there is always something about seeing animals in the wild that connects one with a deeper reality. I believe this is why we seek it out. It is a way of getting back to a level of our being that is primeval, a state we have lost through becoming civilised. That’s not to say that the civilised state is not an advance on the wild condition, but some things are lost while others are gained. To return to that condition would be a spiritual descent but to reconnect with it is healthy. When you see animals in the wild you are reminded of a time when consciousness was not yet separate from its locus. It is not a return to the Garden of Eden but to a time when we had only recently left paradise and the memory of it still endured as a kind of afterglow that hung over the mind even though it was now living in a state of separation. It’s a mark of how far we are from our true selves that this frankly unexceptional experience should have the impact it can have to us spirit-starved moderns. The root meaning of nature is birth, the birth of things, and we seek out wildlife and nature in general to get back to a time of beginnings before we were exiled to make our way in an unforgiving world. Nature in a fallen world is harsh too, but it also has the sense of being in tune with something real that is beyond the little self we currently inhabit.
Much may be lost by our enclosure in that self and yet it can be the springboard to something far greater than nature on her own. The path of spiritual evolution means we descend from pure spirit to become self-conscious in matter whence we can return to spirit with the fruits of phenomenal experience which means an individual self that has become fully conscious of its oneness with spirit. The oneness we know in our early days of involvement in matter, akin to that of a baby, is a safe, benign, beautiful thing but it is purely passive. We have to leave oneness with the Mother in order to know the Father and when we know him then we can become like him, creative centres of universal being ourselves.
We travelled on through the lake which measured about 12 square miles so was reasonably extensive. In a woody area near the shore we saw a troop of Nilgiri langurs who are quite different to their cousins at Ellora with black body fur and light brown manes. They are known for making a loud whooping noise to mark out their territory, and they also bark and screech to deter invaders which they duly did at us as we got a little too close for their liking. They scampered off up into the tops of the trees with their long tails the last we saw of them as they disappeared into the dense foliage. The guide explained that they had infants with them which was the cause of their alarm.
photo by Ashwinsekaran
Still no tiger which wasn’t surprising given how few of them there were, and how they favour the dense jungle away from the lake. But shortly after the boat turned round to return to camp we did see a small herd of elephants who had made their way down to the shore to drink. And then later we saw a group of Sambar deer also slaking their morning thirst. There were plenty of birds as well. I would have loved to have seen a crimson-backed sunbird who are as beautiful as their name sounds and perhaps I did in the distance, but as they are only about 5 inches in size I wouldn’t have known much about it. This description from Wikipedia describes them very well.
“The adult male is velvety red on the mantle and wing coverts and there is a broad red breast band. The crown is shiny green and there are pink-violet patches on the throat and rump. The underside from the breast below is yellowish. There is a black edge to the bib that separates the yellow of the underside.”
photo by Shantanu Kuveskar
It would have been pleasant to have spent more time in Kerala, in particular to explore its many backwaters, but I still regard Tamil Nadu as the ancient heartland and spiritual centre of South India, and the least affected by incursions from elsewhere. Obviously, it’s not a competition and comparisons are odious etc, but there is a spiritual current running through the lands of the Tamils, possibly established by the presence of many great souls over thousands of years, that marks it out as a special place.
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