South India 2013

Gorgeous Goa

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 20:44:26 +0600

The difference in culture is immediately apparent when we cross from Karnataka into Goa. This Portuguese occupied this rich region from 1510 until 1961 when it joined the republic of India and it still reflects its colonial roots. I had imagined mostly beautiful beaches and coast but Goa also encompasses considerable forest land on the edge of the Western Ghats, which we crossed over by car for the third time this trip. Each time has been a different experience with different cultures and people.

The architecture in Goa is distinctive: two tiered sloped tile roofs with lattice balcony on the bottom floor of one story homes and also along the verandah of the second floor of larger houses as well. French shuttered doors and curved top windows and doorways along with some stained glass appear as well. The houses are much larger than in other parts of India, with more land around them, but almost all are in a state of great disrepair if not disintegrating and barely habitable. Although many places in India have small poor huts this is very different: these are large once elegant homes now falling apart.

We drive from the very South of Goa north to the central capital town of Panjim. It is carnival time -- this very day. And the traffic and crowds are tremendous as we hit the city where the main parade is going on. Masks and wigs are everywhere and we are glad to finally wend out way to our absolutely lovely hotel room at the old Panjim Inn. An old home now converted to a hotel, there is a guest lobby filled with antiques and our room, secured by a very old bolt and heavy keyed padlock as found throughout India, enters through a parlor room with an extra bed and then into our very heritage bedroom with carved beds with mosquito net valances, elegant heavy wood furniture and an outside porch. A perfect ending place for our journey.

We take an evening walk to a local temple to see the nighttime aarti fire ceremony. This Hindu temple reflects the great difference in Goan culture. It could be in Fremont, California, as well as in Panjim, Goa. It is new, clean, large, with a good amplification system, marble floors and a bright orange and white ceiling. The many local people who come to pray look as if they could be working in Silicon Valley. All the younger women and girls wear tight jeans and stylish tops, the older women wear the longer selver kameez with a scarf and no saris are in sight, and the men look very prosperous and up to date in trendy tshirts and shirts. As for the ceremony, Beth remarks that it could be any Church in the United States as well. The attendees look like they are going through their set routines, without much religious conviction, talking with each other as they circumambulate the main shrine, and there are of course both young men and women on their cell phones texting their friends or stepping outside to answer their calls. It as if we have moved through this journey from an ancient place through time to end in our modern day, an interesting progression in a culture that moves both at a snails pace and at the speed of DSL.

We can now see the reason why foreign visitors, including the flood of hippies in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, chose Goa as a destination: in addition to the beautiful beaches and cheap drugs, the streets are the cleanest I have seen in India and the residents seem more open to change. Beth and I take a long walk around Panajim in the morning, studying the renovated Portuguese houses (Casa this and Casa that), with streets named in Portugeuse like Rua de Ourem and Gomez Pereira Road. Our walk takes us past some active cathedrals and some old closed chapels and then to the site commemorating where many died at the hands of the Inquisition which, unbelievably, continued here until 1812. This place does not have a happy history for the Hindus who refused to convert. But many here do still follow their Roman Catholic traditions. It is Sunday, the cathedral is filled to overflowing and the stores are all closed.

Panajim is along a river, inland from the beaches and we head a little further from the coast to visit the sites of Old Goa, which are found in a cluster of large, very impressive churches and cathedrals, including the Basilica de Bom Jesus which holds the remains of St. Francis Xavier whose body was returned here from the China coast in the late 1500’s. And the remains of a once thriving St. Augustin community which was abandoned by force under pressure from the Portuguese rulers. The churches are modeled after those of Europe but with local building materials so there are ornate carved pulpits and alter pieces but the ceilings are stuccoed gothic arches.

Our stop at the Museum of Christian Art showed us the transformation of European images into holy relics with an India aesthetic about them. There was a baby Jesus in a silver cradle with silver anklet bracelets and another image where a carved baby Jesus is dressed in draped cloth and jewels similar to those of Krishna.

For our last afternoon, we head to one of Goa’s famous beaches. The first one is so crowded and chaotic, like a cross between Coney Island and a circus, that we leave after walking quite a while trying to locate a specific restaurant. We never did find it but what we did find were hoards of Russians coming to Goa for a cheap respite from the frigid cold of . . Moscow, St. Peterberg, Siberia. Many advertising signs on shops and restaurants are now written in Russian. The beach is filled with rented beach lounges and umbrellas under which lie pale white Russians roasting in the sun.

We head to a quieter beach and dip in the Arabian sea. We are the only two women on the crowded shore with bathing suits on. The Indian women bathe in their clothes or at least long blouses and pants. This could be dangerous as it is apparent many of them do not know how to swim and the current is somewhat strong. The lifeguard patrols the outer border of the safe swim area in a jetski -- so there is the smell of gasoline which is also undoubtedly in the water. While we lounge on our chairs, we are constantly interrupted by peddlers asking if we want a manicure, pedicure, foot massage, some jewelry or some pineapple. We take nothing, head back a little sandy and are now ready to head out for our last meal together.

Tomorrow we are visiting some old Portugeuse homes so I might write an epiloque to this story, but for now, I send you all my best from this place of great contrasts and beauty.

Temples and Caves

Fri, 8 Feb 2013 22:33:48 +0600

We are on our way to even earlier historical sights, from the 3rd through 7th centuries. The temples of Aihole, the world heritage site of Pattadakal and the caves of Badami.

Here are some interesting things we see along the road: a sign painted on the wall outside a girls school prohibiting the sale of cigarettes in the immediate area (excellent!), a group of women squatting by the roadside selling fish by the edge of a river near the Tungabhadra Fish Farm, a large wind turbine blade on a flatbed truck (we have seen a number of wind farms on hillsides), and a herd of water buffalo that surround our car as we pass through a small town and push in our side view mirror. We see tractors decorated in front like beauty queens, garlanded with bright colored flowers and ribbons, in the same way that trucks are decorated or the bullocks pulling carts are adorned. And cars as well. Our driver bought a string of small limes which he placed across the front grill of his car after he visited the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai. For good luck, he says.

We enter a beautiful divided tollway, a National Highway, with two lanes on each side, with bougainvillea plantings in the median. But wait! Beth gasps and notices there is a motorcycle and then a car coming towards us going the other way in our lane. Our driver says passenger vehicles sometime do this to avoid making a loop to find a crossing point. Okay, but then there is a small truck facing us stopped dead ahead in our lane, so our driver moves around him and just laughs and says, this is an example of “Incredible India”. Progress is indeed being made but with India’s own indelible imprint. Photo of an unstrapped boulder on a very bumpy road on a truck right in front of our car.

Sitting on the porch of our hotel room this evening, there is a magnificent pink and purple sky behind a row of trees, a field of vegetables and then a line of coconut and banana trees. The sounds at sunset are memorable and soothing: the whoo whoo whoo of monkeys calling to each other in the trees near us and the mooing of cows a little further away and beyond that the light honk of the motor rickshaws, the deeper sound of truck gears, and the faint sound of music, Indian movie music, from someone’s speakers as well as temple sounds in the far distance. After putting up a clothes line for some laundry outside, I realized it is too tempting for the monkeys and bring it all indoors.

The Badami caves this afternoon were a carnival of people and children. It appears to be a favorite location for a field trip for school children and Beth and I were surrounded by children who acted like they had never seen anyone like us before. And blond Beth was a tempting target who agreed to some handshakes and soon found that this act was interpreted to mean permission to begin touching other parts of her body. And although it would be easy to escalate this to describe a microcosm of older men’s attitudes of privilege over women in India, I have to say that we experienced a similar phenomenon in other temples with young girls as well. Beth and I discussed this reaction of children here and think, perhaps falsely, that American children would not interact in a similar way if someone totally unique walked into their sphere. Perhaps because our culture instills in us from birth a sense of personal space whereas here in a crowded populous culture with little privacy, there is no sense of distance between people. So it is acceptable to invade a stranger’s world by touching or pulling on clothes or sticking out your hand in front of someone’s face.

The four caves themselves are from different periods and have detailed carvings on the outside with less decorative pillars deeper inside the cavern structure. They overlook a lake and must have been hidden enough to avoid desecration over the years from pillaging invaders.

The temples of Aihole were magnificent examples of very early temple architecture: 4th and 5th century structures, displaying the experiments and advances in temple design with the first attempts at an apsidal structure and later a tiered roof. The Pattadakal site contains 10 temples from the 7th and 8th centuries reflecting early evidence of the ornate carvings of the Hindu pantheon which we associate with great Indian art. Included are carvings telling the story of the Mahabharata, depictions of everyday life including the hair and clothing styles of those time, and more secular carvings of men and women together in intimate positions. All interesting.

We see a lot of tourists and ask our guide about the nationality of most of his clients. He says that for this part of India it is 90% French, then Italians, Russians and last of all British and Americans. We have only run into one other American tourist to date.

Beth and I have a world class dinner at the all-vegetarian hotel we are staying in. Our driver tells us that Badami is a dirty town he does not like. I like it all.

Enthralled in Hampi

Thu, 7 Feb 2013 16:53:47 +0600

I am standing on a boulder-strewn hilltop above the small town of Hampi with the gopuram of the local temple, built in the 1500’s, in the background. Our intense one-day journey through Hampi started for me with an early morning walk along the Tungabhadra River where a good percentage of the male population of this small town takes its morning bath and the mahout bathes the temple elephant. Beth and I have breakfast at a rooftop restaurant, one of many, and we meet our guide who takes us in and around the many beautiful remains of temples and royal buildings that were once part of the great Hindu Vijayanagar empire.

The Archeology Survey of India is attempting to relocate all the villagers out of the historical district to nearby locations in order to better preserve this world heritage site. I can understand why as there is a great deal of garbage on the ground from the visitors, mainly Indian, who come to this small town whose only industry is tourism. A wide swathe of the old town has already been evacuated and partially demolished and further changes are coming.

This large 27-kilometer wide site is strewn with the remains of temples and marketplaces from about 1300-1585 at which time it was destroyed by its jealous neighbors. Many of the Stonehenge looking structures, pillars with cross beans, are crooked and look like they are balancing precariously on one another but visitors are allowed to walk right up to and in them despite the possible danger. Some of the earlier temples and buildings have an angular South Indian aesthetic while newer buildings are Indo-Saracen in design, with much Muslim influence.

We take a short boat ride across the river on a small motorized boat with many motorcycles and people piled up in the back and it is a little worrisome as we seem very heavy and low in the water and we realize if the boat sinks, although we can swim, the crashing motorcycles would be a death knell. This concern for accidents that could be avoided with more safety precautions, or inspections, is not unreasonable as the reason this boat is the only means across to Anegonda, the original capital of the Vijayanagar Empire, is because the new bridge right next us collapsed a few years ago, killing 16 people who just happened to be on it at the wrong moment. The cause, our guide says, was political incompetence because the bridge was started and stopped so many times that different kinds of concrete were used, some of which failed. Below, the failed bridge, and a visitor with a motorcycle on the boat.

In Anegonda, we visit a women’s weaving coop attempting to provide a living for the village women by charging a fair trade price for their crafts made out of banana fibre. In order to support these women, Beth and I each buy a hand bag and Beth is able to photograph them at work.

We also visit a temple with intricately carved pillars which play, when struck by sticks, different notes replicating the timbre of different classical instruments. In the height of this civilization, 38 musicians played the columns, while dancers performed in the center courtyard. Sitting on the steps of a smaller nearby temple, looking at the space where this event occurred, I think about the fact that I am only a second generation American, and there are such short notes of historical culture where I live. The people in this region have thousands of years of an artistic and musical culture underneath them which waxed and waned and has transformed over time but must still provide some sense of roots in the earth.

I realize that many of the sites I have seen today were excavated after my friends Thelma and Foster visited Hampi in 1966, which is when I first heard of this place which was outside of any tourists books at the time. Some of the major sections were dug in 1980-1990 by an American and British archaeologist. I imagine in another 40 years, there will be further additions to this world heritage collection.

Beth and I climb to a hilltop to watch the sunset over the ruins and the Hampi temple and bask in the beauty of the boulders and the pink sky over the palm studded landscape.

One memory of the day: young men playing cricket with their cell phones held to their ears!

The Glories of Halebib and Hampi

Wed, 6 Feb 2013 14:39:58 +0600

After a long restful sleep at the Hoysala Village Resort, we sit down to a wonderful breakfast, with our chef delivering to us fresh dosa pancakes to go along with our fresh watermelon juice, papaya, and steamed idlli rice cakes with fresh coconut chutney. We have been eating 3 large meals a day and it is always a delight although I have had some problem maintaining a vegan diet here with ghee and yogurt added to so many dishes.

We drive first today to a small hidden Hoysala temple, the Mahalakshmi Temple, tucked away down a narrow dirt road and around some boulder-filled hills behind a small village. The guardian of this site unlocks the gates and takes us through it, explaining the deities, as this is a living temple of the village. It is well worn and inside are bits and pieces of salvaged sculptures that were either from the original temple complex or found in the surrounding area. Most of them are worthy of display in a first-class museum and I think about how tempting it must be for impoverished people to sneak out a piece or two and sell it on the black market. But I think religious belief keeps them honest from sacrificing these ancient stone works.

The village itself is interesting and probably a representative sample of hundreds of other villages in the region. One main dirt road, more a path just wide enough for one car, on both sides small living quarters and animal shelters with cows and water buffalo or bulls for ploughing. A small Hindu shrine hidden by the side of a home, one or two tea stall type stores, selling some essentials, a school with beautiful uniformed children playing outside as more children walk up the road to join them, and a small building with some kind of medical facilities or offices, perhaps a pharmacy as well. A brightly painted bullock cart is in front of one house and piles of hay in another. The wealthiest home in the village is painted bright green and has a tractor in its carport and a satellite dish outside. Definitely more upscale. Many men and women sit around a colored building with painted signs on it outside and maybe it is a government place of some kind.

Halebib was as beautiful as its sister temple in Belur, with even more intricate carvings on the outside but with more sedate decorations inside, although some have obviously been looted and are gone forever. There is someone meditating in front of the main shrine, dedicated to Shiva. Shiva’s vehicle, Nandi the bull sits in royal elegance on a raised platform with a sculpture overhead covering, always facing Shiva. Many local people are here for the history and for worship so that the grey and black temple is embellished with the ever colorful saris of the visiting women.

Walking around the star shaped structure, we see the layers of friezes on the bottom rising up to delicately carved images of various incarnations of Shiva and ther deities as well as images of everyday life. There is a scene of a musical event with musicians and dancers. There are erotic scenes as well. All of life is here, the people and the Gods, immortally engraved into stone which has survived through the centuries. The Hoysala dynasty and its creative output was stilled at some point in the 1500’s with the attacks of northern Muslim armies and never recovered. It is an intense visit of great beauty.

The rest of our day is a long car drive, moving through dry landscapes with coconut groves the only apparent crops, to more verdant river-fed areas with corn and vegetable crops and a higher population. Dried out river beds remind us of the preciousness of water and its critical place in an agrarian economy. A new road is being constructed on part of our route and ancient banyan trees have been cut down and are drying out on the side of the road to widen the original path for increased commerce. I suppose this is an advance but our driver tells us that the partially built graveled and difficult to traverse roadway has been in this rough condition for many years now with no immediate end in sight as the wheels of the state government run slow at best.

At last we arrive in Hampi, choosing to stay in the small bazaar village in the center of the archeological site. All around us are ancient ruins, which some have compared to the parthenon and relics of ancient Greece. It is sunset and the rosy glow over the main temple in town is a lovely site. Although as we walk through the Hampi bazzar, I say to Beth, “And you thought you missed the 60’s -- they are still right here!”. Young people from around the world with large backpacks looking as I remember the travelers in Kathmandu in 1969.

It is hot and Beth and I are sitting at a rooftop restaurant which is playing old Bob Marley songs. Our guest house is definitely a cut below, maybe a few cuts below, where we have been staying. But then, we have the wonder of Hampi right near us to make up for any discomfort.

The Temples of Karnataka

Tue, 5 Feb 2013 00:30:00 +0600

Leaving the Wayanad National Forest we have a wonderful experience. We were told the elephants are not around now as they have moved inland due to the drought. But as we drive along the road through the sanctuary, there is a large elephant walking toward us on the side of the road. Our driver is scared because he says solo elephants can be very dangerous so we can not stop long but must be on our way toward Mysore.

I have a sophisticated and wealthy Indian friend in Delhi who travels around the world on business and pleasure, buys designer clothes and drives a Mercedes. She chides me for speaking of India as if it was still 1965, as if India was still a backward and undeveloped country. And that is in part true. But in the rural India we have been passing through in the Mysore area, it is still 1965, if not 1865, with the farmers still living in great poverty and very few advances in their lifestyle and probably life expectancy.

Our earlier drive from Thrissur to Wayanad in Northern Kerala took us from the very tropical plains into the cool hills where tea and spices are king and rule the economy. Returning to into the plains of Mysore, we are met with a slightly different culture once again. Beth remarks that when traveling from state to state in the US there is sometimes just a little sense of the difference as one crosses state lines. The changes are greater here, with a different language, slightly different architecture and the overlay of slightly different religious practices.

Entering the countryside of Karnataka State, we see poor stucco and mud houses along the side of the road, women carrying very large pots of water on their heads from the local hand pump, an old woman tilling a field with a cow, groups of people bent over in the fields, perhaps planting or weeding, a hut with cowdung patties stuck to its sides to be used in the future for fuel, a white bullock pulling a cart filled with hay, and ploughs being pulled by two yoked brahma bulls with bells in their ears. The percentage of people in rural poverty may have diminished since my first arrival in India but it still remains very high and a noticeable part of the society. My friend in Delhi certainly knows this way of life still exists but probably thinks of it in the same way we Americans think of our black ghettos, just a small blip in a larger picture of prosperity in our good society. Beth and I met a British couple with posh London accents along the road near our guest house in the countryside of Wayanad last night, talked a bit, and in connection with the drought that is impacting everything in South India, I mentioned how some of our politicians in the U.S. still do not believe in global warming. They responded that America is a strange place in many ways. Our refusal to see the negative pockets of poverty in our own society may be one such example -- as it may be among wealthier Indians as well.

We have been driving many hours a day and the landscape is always interesting, between the rural landscape, small villages and bustling towns, the road from smooth divided highway to narrow broken up asphalt and everything in between.

Once in more urban Mysore, Beth visits the Mysore palace while I head out again for Somnathpur, an hour away, and one of the 3 great Hoysala Temples of the region. It is an archeological site, devoid of tourists and visitors, beautiful in its isolation and fluted lines, decorated with intricate carvings of gods and dancers honoring them.

After a lunch at RRR local eatery, with lines out the door and a wait, where we eat a great lunch served on a banana leaf and sit with two women graduate students from Teheran, in tight pants and tops who admit it would be hard to go back to the restrictions of current day Iran and will look for work in another country.

We arrive late in the afternoon in the town of Belur, in time to visit the great Hoysala Belur temple, built in the 1200’s. Unlike Somnathpur, it is a living temple, surrounded by merchants with their many-colored flowered garlands of devotion for sale. The temple itself takes our breathe away, especially in the setting sun, the dark stone with strong carvings of gods in their many forms and dancers.

Although there has been some wear on the outside from weather, inside the sacred space it is timeless, the sculpture as brilliant and sharp as if made yesterday. There is a cupola worthy of the highest worship, and an alter surrounded by two magnificent statues of Vishnu, inside the inner sanctum the black garlanded image of god as Venkateshvara, with priests in their white dhotis and sacred threads across their bare chests. They are talking and laughing with each other, stopping now and again to give blessed water and offerings to the worshippers. The entry to the inner sanctum is protected by two large Vishnu images, magnificent in their workmanship, both a dark shining black that reflects the sacred fires and oil lamps that surround them. These are living sculptures in a space worthy of them and enough to inspire devotion in any visitor.