Jewelled pendant, tear drop, whitewash and lye: not so gentle Sri Lanka

Hanging plump pear. Jewelled pendant. Sri Lanka has also been the object of plunder and its people have been cruel to each other.

“From Seyllan to Paradise is forty miles … a paradise to be sacked.” In these first days in Sri Lanka I have begun reading Michael Ondaatje’s “Running in the Family” where this legend is quoted. He continues:

“Every conceivable thing was collected and shipped back to Europe: cardamons, pepper, silk, ginger, sandalwood, mustard oil, palmyrah root, tamarind, wild indigo, deers’ horns, elephant tusks, hog lard, calamander, coral, seven kinds of cinnamon, pearl and cochineal. A perfumed sea.”

The island’s changing names follow the whims of invaders and empire-builders.  “The island,” Ondaatje writes, “seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as its shape, - Serendip, Ratnapida (‘island of gems’), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon – the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language.”

The island’s history of civil misery includes generations of despot kings and autocratic ruling families, along with their innumerable patricides, matricides, fratricides, battles, dismemberings, beheadings and torture.

Most recently has been the especially vicious 25-year-long war between the Tamil Tigers and the Buddhist-dominated government and military – a war urged on by nationalist monks and nuns, in which is it estimated 70,000 people were killed, including many civilians. Research suggests that in the last months of the war alone, 7,000 civilians were killed by government forces. And in a variety of ways the war continues today into the “peace”: the public, government and Tamil leaderships’ efforts to distort or deny the past, the absence of accountability for atrocities, the exclusion of most Tamils from social-economic opportunities available to the Sinhalese majority.

Most of the people we talk with are Sinhalese, guesthouse owners, restaurateurs. For them, as they say, the “peace comes as such relief.” The war, they soon add, was the work of Tamil “terrorists” and “thugs.” “We are getting along together now,” one says. The voices of the victors. Other conversations would tell another story, as does the little reading I have done on Sri Lanka.

Sri Lankans have suffered other kinds of violence as well – most recently the 2004 tsunami. We found ourselves thinking about this disaster as we travelled the island’s south beaches and struggled in the high surf. But it wasn’t until we stepped off the bus in Galle, in the city’s flat sea-level centre – crowded with buses, people, markets and shops – that we could more realistically imagine the tsunami’s impact. It was precisely through this bustling centre in the late afternoon on January 3 that the six-metre-high surge of water swept, drowning thousands and injuring thousands more, throwing buses like small toys, crushing stalls and shops. Well over forty thousand dead across the island, 2.5 million homeless, so many children orphaned, food and water sources in ruins.

Remarkably, really, the centre of Galle is again a crowded, hectic travel and market hub. But where, along this coast, is January 3 within people’s lives, their memories, their families? Some, protected by coves, experienced the tsunami not at all. For many others, though, memories of that day might be most clearly seen in the remaining concrete skeletons that were once their homes, the uprooted palm trees churned into confused stacks of roots and stems, or those small graveyards with their bouquets of fresh flowers buffeted by the sea winds.

This must be already too much to bear. But Sri Lanka’s social – human-spawned – violence also continues without seeming end. Today, for example, an online news article describes reports of the forced bulldozing of beach guesthouses, apparently by agents of the ruling family and the military to make way for large resort projects financed by they and their friends. Tourist numbers are rising since the end of the war, and those with money see even more in those long stretches of brown sand. When I ask Sri Lankans about this report, they are not surprised. “This is what the ruling family does.”  “This is how things are here.” 

In his “Running in the Family,” Ondaatje recalls another period of violence that feels like a parable of historical memory in Sri Lanka. In 1971, he writes, the government rounded up thousands of suspects from what was called at the time “the Insurgency,” a disorganized, chaotic revolt of hopeful young people against the status quo. The Vidyalankara campus of the University of Ceylon was turned into a prison camp. When the campus reopened, returning students found hundreds of poems written on walls, ceilings and in hidden corners of the campus. “Quatrains and free verse about the struggle, tortures, the unbroken spirit, love of friends who had died for the cause. The students went around for days transcribing them into their notebooks before they were covered with whitewash and lye.”

Ondaatje later talks with a librarian who has published a book with photos of charcoal drawings done by insurgents on the walls of one of the houses he, the librarian, has stayed in. The authorities immediately banned the librarian’s book. Ondaatje again reflects on the thousands of teens who were killed by the police in 1971, thrown into the Kelani and Mahaveli rivers that flow to the sea, made to vanish, just like their drawings were destroyed – the librarian’s banned book now the only tangible record. “The works,” he writes, “seem as great as the Sigiriya frescoes. They too need to be eternal.”

Women like you: The Sigiriya rock paintings

"Ladies like you / Make men pour out their hearts. / You also have thrilled the body / Making its hair / Stiffen with desire.”

Sigiriya. Lion Rock. – There it sits in a corner of my memory, surprising, monumental, monstrous, enigmatic, its curvy garlanded women, those excited voices inscribed on stone, its lion’s claws and gaping lion’s mouth – all calling for my attention.

So here I return, now several months and a half a world away, to that rock and those women ….

Imagine a 150-metre high rock – a 50-storey building – rising suddenly and solitary from a vast green plain. The rock’s westerly face is covered in 500 frescoes of bare-breasted women, each festooned in flowers and jewels. On a nearby polished “mirror wall,” visitors are writing couplets and quatrains, graffiti-style, describing their responses on seeing the women. The remains of a palace rest on the summit, once accessible by walking from a terrace halfway up the rock through mammoth, stone-cut lion’s paws, then through the lion’s gaping mouth. Formal gardens, pools and fountains stretch from the rock’s base. In the far distance, earthen ramparts and a moat surround the whole complex.

Sigiriya – in north-central Sri Lanka, the buildings and gardens from the 5^th century, the paintings from the same era or at least a century later, the graffiti added later still – is easily enough described in broad outline. But step beyond its most obvious characteristics and you enter a fog thicker than that swirling around Adam’s Peak in the mountains to the south.

Are these the ruins of a palace or a fortress – or both? Was the complex once a monastery or a king’s fortress refuge – or both? Was the king a patricidal megalomaniac or a pleasure-loving aesthete – or both?

And the women in the paintings (about 20 remain)?  They rise from painted clouds, full-breasted, shoulders soft and sloping, bodies splendidly adorned in flowery and bejewelled tiaras, coronets, bracelets and necklaces, their long delicate fingers holding lotus flowers and other blossoms, the line from coronet to hips suggesting that sensual S-curve of the female body found in sculpture, paintings and dance across south and east Asia.

Are these women a king’s courtesans? The work of court painters ordered to decorate the rock with beautiful maidens? Buddhist goddesses? Representations of the goddess Tara, or of Cloud and Lightning goddesses, or more lowly apsaras?

There are hardly two people who agree on any of this. Nor has the thin historical record helped, based as it is on chronicles, legends, hearsay and limited archaeological research, all of which has fed an array of speculative and conflicting claims.

On our visit, we arrived by foot amongst rows of parked vans and buses and hundreds of other visitors. The site attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year, mainly for the spectacular summit vistas and to see the women.

Our route takes us across the moat and ramparts, through the “pleasure gardens” with their formal patterns, fountains, and water hydraulic system (ingenious for the 5^thC we read); along winding pathways at the foot of the rock, among boulder-strewn gardens, terraces, cisterns and pools, stone archways and a five-metre-long granite throne, all constructed from fallen boulders; then further up a modern iron staircase to the painting gallery and graffiti mirror wall; then higher still to the mid-level terrace, past the enormous sharp claws on the lion’s paws, past the ruins of the lion’s mouth, up and further up another iron staircase (the original steps were small carved hollows in the sheer wall) until we are at the ellipsis-shaped summit among the foundation ruins of tiered palaces and deep pools. Far beneath us spreads a dark green plain and glistening, meandering rivers, serpentine, serpents.

(A photograph of Sigiriya taken from the far west and at an elevation somewhat higher than the summit gives the rock and its westerly-flowing gardens the uncanny appearance of a colossal throne. Although the view seems one that would have been difficult for the builders of the 5thC palace-fortress to have experienced, other pre-modern peoples have imagined geographical shapes and relationships with surprising accuracy from an aerial perspective.)

It is here on the summit where we have our picnic lunch – or attempt to, if it weren’t for the monkeys that inch ever closer, lunges in their eyes, chattering every-monkey-for-itself chatter. It is only some barking hound from who knows where, 50 storeys up, who keeps them at a slight distance. A smart hound, this, for it is she who gets to gobble up our thank-you scraps and, inexplicably, is already waiting for us a thousand steps below at the lion’s claws.

But what about the star attractions of Sigiriya: the women in the frescoes?

Some people think that around the 10thC Sigiriya’s western face was covered in 500 similar images. Today only some 20 remain. The close-up view of the paintings used here would have been that of the painters, but it might not have been that of 10thC viewers. Some scholars argue that most people would have viewed the women from some distance, seeing them as representational figures in standard poses. This too is disputed.

The women’s upper bodies – they appear to emerge from cloud images at their hips and waists – are  naked except for their elaborate and colourful necklaces, bracelets, head ornaments and the flowers they hold. Each women is represented by certain common features (the S-curve of the body, the head’s downward tilt, the overall facial expression, the decorative/symbolic elements), and yet several also have subtly unique facial and bodily characteristics.

Most attractive for me are the women’s soft-sloping shoulders, the forward thrust of their pelvis and hips, the naturalistic folds of skin along the belly, the forward tilt of their necks and heads, their long arms and fingers, and the exquisitely gentle, loving, even sensual way those hands – long palms, curved fingers – hold lotus blossoms and other flowers. Looking at those fingers touching – caressing? – the blossoms, I feel such pleasurable tenderness. Surely we’re seeing here a centre of the painter’s personal felt-interest and energy.

The line of the women’s arms, wrists, palms and fingers suggest the sensual S-curves formed by the line through each woman’s tiara, head, neck, chest, waist and hips. This same bodily S-curve or tribhanga pose, emphasizing hips and breasts, is found in ancient representations of women across Hindu and often Buddhist -influenced Asia.

Curiously, most of the women’s breasts seem attached to (not a natural element of) their bodies. It is as the painters had sculptural models in mind, not live models, or in depicting life-giving goddesses, they were treating breasts as a symbol of fertility and sustenance. The breasts are also exaggerated relative to the overall body size, and they exaggerate in turn the slightness of the women’s waists with their natural rolls of flesh. A partial exception is a woman painted in profile whose breasts have natural weight and downward pull. We won’t know if there were other women like this, more naturalistic, among the five-hundred.

The women’s eyes are sometimes bright and outward-looking, but more often slightly downward cast, languid, and always noticeably long. Their lips are often curved into indecipherable – content, waiting, patient, whimsical, comforting? – smiles. One modern-day viewer describes the ‘look’ as both open and introvert at the same time, and I can see why. There’s something of I-am-ready-to-be-whatever-you-expect in that look.

I was told by a guide at the gallery that each figure represented a woman from Sri Lanka and other parts of the world: Africa, the far east, Persia. Although it is not a claim I have found anywhere else, it is true that at least one woman has distinctly African facial features.

(Having said all this, I read that centuries of wear on the paint and elements of the painters’ techniques can result in distortions in visual detail and thus in modern-day responses, especially regarding the women’s faces.)

Why were these paintings done in the first place? And what really existed at Sigiriya in ancient times? Contending theories, most of them strongly speculative, abound.

One approach sees the 5^thC palace-fortress complex as the brainchild of King Kassapa and his court. According to the Mahavamsa chronicle, written years after the events it describes and sketchy at best, Kassapa entombed his father-king alive then, fearing retribution by his brother, fled to Sigiriya where he build a fortress-palace. (Kassapa’s brother eventually killed him, or he killed himself, depending on how you read the page leaves.)

Kassapa himself has been given many identities. In one version he is not a patricide at all, but rather a misunderstood or misremembered aesthete, the pleasure palace, gardens and paintings his secular “homage to beauty.” In another he is a devout leader, a patron of the local monastery, who had the paintings done for religious purposes (or: to glorify his own image). Or he built the complex to honour his father. Or he is a king-murdering, narcissistic, paranoid megalomaniac (remember the lion’s claws and mouth?) who led repeated wars against his neighbours and indulged in profligate ‘beautification’ projects.

Quite another approach is to see Sigiriya as a Buddhist monastery. Indeed its rock shelters and caves functioned like this before Kassapa’s time and the site became a monastery again a century (or five centuries) later. In this view, the paintings are done after Kassapa’s tenancy, the women represent various religious figures and the rock becomes a place of pilgrimage.

So who are these women? Courtesans of the royal court and bed chambers? Queens and princesses on their way to worship Buddhist gods? Beautiful, decorative objects, like the gardens and fountains? Heavenly beings (those clouds) of various kinds: your standard apsaras waiting on the gods; Lighting and Cloud goddesses, created to glorify Kassapa; the Mahayana Buddhist goddess Tara, a favoured goddess found across south and east Asia, a splendidly-adorned female Buddha associated with compassion, enlightenment, power and prosperity? 

Welcome to the fog of understanding hanging over Sigiriya.

For most of us, though, maybe it needn’t matter what the women are supposed to represent; maybe what matters is how we experience them in themselves. This is the approach taken by the graffiti writers – some 1,500 of them: kings and queens, monks, a guard, a smithy and other travellers – who began visiting the paintings a century and more after they were completed. Their comments are of great interest to those studying the Sinhalese language and script, but they also give us a good sense of what people of the time understood these paintings to be about in terms of their own experience.

On one essential point – and in stark contrast to a major line of modern-day theorizing on the paintings – many of the graffitists agree. Whereas the visitors appear to have arrived with an understanding that the goddess-women are supposed to elevate them into a ‘heavenly’ state of physical disinterestedness, detachment, contemplation and piety, unencumbered by physical desire, their own experience of the women has the exact opposite effect.

As one person writes: “Ladies like you / Make men pour out their hearts / And you also have thrilled the body / Making its hair / Stiffen with desire.”

And a second: “By means of the splendour of the mountain side, I saw their manner in which nymphs stood in heaven. My hand jumped up with the desire of grasping their girdle in dalliance.”

Or: “The girl with golden skin entices the mind and eyes. / Her lovely breasts cause me to recall swans drunk with nectar.”

 And: “Who is not happy when he sees / Those rosy palms, rounded shoulders / Gold necklaces, copper-hued lips / And long long eyes.”

A woman, too, sees attractive rivals in the paintings: “A deer-eyed young woman of the mountainside arouses anger in my mind. In her hand she holds a string of pearls and in her looks she assumes rivalry with me.”

The heavens don’t stand a chance, as at least one visitor makes clear,: “The ladies who wear golden chains on their breasts beckon me. As I have seen the resplendent ladies, heaven appears to me as not so good.”

The women as objects of contemplation, detachment, piety – as some scholars argue? Hardly. These are embodied, sexual responses, the responses of longing, attraction and expectant fantasy. Whatever the painters’ patrons thought they were asking to be depicted on Sigiriya’s walls, what they got “thrilled the body” and made heaven “not so good.”

Today, writing on Sigiriya’s walls is forbidden, which is too bad because surely visitors still have things they’d like to say, and some arrangement could be made for the old wall’s protection.

But there it is: keep your experiences to yourself.

No everyone is so compliant though. Here is Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje’s Sigiriya poem “Women Like You.” 

Women Like You
(the communal poem – Sigiri graffiti, 5^th century)

They do not stir

these ladies of the mountain

do not give us

the twitch of eyelids.

            The king is dead.

They answer no one

take the hard

rock as lover

Women like you

make men pour out their hearts

            ‘Seeing you I want

            no other life’

            ‘The golden skins have

            caught my mind’

who came here

out of the bleached land

climbed this fortress

to adore this rock

and with the solitude of the air

behind them

            carved an alphabet

whose motive was perfect desire

wanting these portraits of women

to speak

to caress.

Hundreds of small verses

by different hands

became one

habit of the unrequited.

Seeing you
I want no other life
and turn around
to the sky
and everywhere below
jungle, waves of heat
secular love

Holding the new flowers
a circle of
first finger and thumb
which is a window
to your breast

pleasure of the skin
earring     earring

curl
of the belly
         and then
stone mermaid
stone heart
dry as a flower
on rock
you long eyed women

the golden
drunk swan of breasts
lips
the long long eyes

we stand against the sky
I bring you
a flute
from the throat
of a loon
so talk to me
of a used heart

“What are you thinking of India?”

Many Indian’s ask us “How are you liking India?” The question usually feels prompted by genuine interest, but the manner of asking suggests the questioner really wants to hear India praised. Some put the question differently. “How are you finding India?” “What are you thinking of India?” Now this one, no built-in bias, more room for the mix of our experiences, is easier to begin answering. 

So, after fourteen weeks in the country, what do I think of when I think about India?  

The throngs of people. On the streets, at bus and rail stations, in temples. The invariably long, haphazard, meandering queues. It is as if pretty well everything and every place is undersized, shrunken, relative to the number of people who must move about.

The constant noise. Honking, beeping vehicles. Roaring, sputtering, put-put-putting engines. Loud, often shrill voices. The clamour of temples bells and music. Full-volume videos running through unfathomable concoctions of bloody fists, fairylands and bombast. So few quiet places to be. 

The memorable individuals we have met along our way, people who respond genuinely out of their own character, experiences, memories to each of us as other individuals, not as “tourists,” not as abstractions. The guesthouse hosts (father, mother, daughter) who discussed from their three different perspectives the effort of “finding a good husband” for daughter. Gopi, the  kindly, gentleman “clerk” on the Kerala train who had read Dalrymple’s chapter on theyyem and, with dogged struggling English, so wanted me to read it. The gentleman guide at the Dr Ramnath A Poddar Haveli who, late one day, so generously, so intelligently showed us the painted walls of the grand old house, patiently sketched out the key Hindu gods, then invited us to return the next morning (which we did) because “The house has so many more stories.” The puppeteer who entertained me with the dancing girl and trickster. Narendra Mehta, the painter of miniatures. Zaveri the Jain pilgrim. Our host Gilbert (and his family) at the Alliance Guesthouse, with his open welcome and great walking advice up into the nearby hills and villages. The nameless ones who helped us find a bus station or post office or eating place, to get off a train at the right stop, to better understand where we were, prepared and served us delicious meals.

Traffic frenzy – which we feel whenever we walk, in any vehicle we ride (including those several near-death rides), in the town streets thick with exhaust and churning dust, in engine noise, in the surrounding whirl of movement.

The impossibility of experiencing the pleasures of strolling, at least in urban India. Sidewalks have been rare and are often clogged with stalls, scatterings of repair set-ups, vehicles and garbage. Walking must be done on the street, dodging vehicles from every direction, searching one’s way through more parked vehicles, watching for cow shit and scattered garbage, squeezing through throngs of others also finding their way, walking amidst the stench of urine and rotting waste. So much of one’s attention becomes narrowed to the next step and the beeps at one’s shoulder. Forget conversation. Forget the wider view. Forget any reflective lingering.

Other more critical kinds of turmoil – of ‘new India’. The preposterously concentrated and quick wealth of “new India,” its privatized world of gleaming (conspicuous but blinding) towers and its gated houses, its surrounding sewer-soaked servant shanties, its overwhelming Westernized ethos and culture, its need for ever-expanding ‘security’, its aura of ‘progress’, its promise of ‘success’, its work culture of old coolieism. The many suicides among small land-holding farmers. The continuing, habituated patterns of police/state violence: torture in police stations, the phenomenon of police-orchestrated ‘fake encounters’ (called ‘extrajudicial executions’ under international law).The hopeful-desperate journeys through the Emirates and indenturism. What Ashis Nandy called in 2000 “the growing criminalization of politics in the country” – and today its normalization.

Fondly remembered places and times. Walks in mountain villages above Naggar and in the Sangla-Kinnaur mountain area. Dewali in Delhi with Prem and Santosh and their neighbours. Sitting over cold beer at the Costa Malabari Guesthouse talking about the theyyem rituals; experiencing the intimate processes of applying the dance make-up and costumes.  Moving by boat and train through the green and watery world of the Kerala and Malabar coast, conversations with strangers along the way. The conversational English class with Tibetan refugees in MacLeod Ganj and talking with other refugees there. Rocking back and forth slow-motion atop those camels, then night fall and moonlight and sunrise with chair on the Rajasthan dunes. The many colourful, frenzied, magical, incomprehensible and exhausting temple worlds we witnessed.

What appears to me Indians’ very precise – remarkable to me – sense of space. Vehicle collisions seem so often imminent and yet surprisingly infrequent, especially given the numbers on any road. Passing drivers are able to negotiate the narrowest laneway and cliffside roads with millimetres to spare. Crowded passing pedestrians behave similarly, so often just slipping by each other at the last second. Bumps and knocks feel rare, except in some queues, and are seen as true accidents: met by surprise and politeness. The message? This is unusual. Considering the times my backpack has jostled and bumped others, or made them dodge in crowded spaces, I’ve come to believe that these unnatural protuberances of the body disturb a finely-tuned Indian sense of the space a natural body takes.

Such diversity, such extremes: India’s many “Indias.” Its many landscapes, languages, expressions of spirituality and faith, foods, body colourings and characteristics and expressive habits. The extremes of poverty and wealth. The impossible to fathom spectrum that runs from a world of the high tech, high fashion and industrial-corporate (mimicking selected aspects of 200 years of Western “progress”) through to feudal working and living conditions, pre-modern villages and beliefs, vast urban slums and human uprootedness, and a lively ancient spiritualism. Diversity, yes, but also these extremes. Oil, water, fire.

The fascinating incomprehensible worlds of expressed faith – especially at the many and varied temples and shrines, in the prolific world of Hindu and other gods, goddesses, spirits, venerated humans, creatures, flora, places. The fantastical shapes and colours taken by (or used to represent) the gods, their presences not only on temples but on house roof-tops, pillars, porticos, twisting, glowering, embracing, exhibitionists, guardians, energies. This is a land of the live spiritual imagination like no other I know.

Public filth: waste casually dropped or tossed anywhere, rare garbage bins usually hidden under a heap of waste, streets lined with scattered rotting garbage, increasing amounts of plastic waste, street sides rank with sun-baked urine, walking places littered with smeared cow shit, so many public spaces filled with the stench of filth. The filth kept astonishing us, but no less did so many Indian’s contribution to and seeming shrugs in the face of it. Those towns and states where there is an effort to reduce public filth (thus demonstrating that this is possible), set the scale of the issue in sharper relief in the rest of the country.

The handsomeness of so many of the sari-clad women and white-shirted men – all the more extraordinary against the ground of their often dusty, filthy and shabby surroundings. Just down a laneway strewn with days of garbage stand two straight-back, white-bearded men, white dhotis brilliant in the desert sun, one in saffron pagari (turban), the other in red, a hand on one another’s shoulder, eye-to-eye, smiling, coupled in conversation. Those saris: the women’s eye for such pleasing, often gorgeous, combinations of colour, pattern and design. How the sari itself can swirl along the female form, feet to forehead, the sparkle of tinselly threads or miniature mirrors, the fabric rippling in the slightest breeze, flame-like.

Especially tasty foods such as the stuffed bhel puris of north India; raj kahori, a sweet and spicy concoction in a puri or thin pastry shell; cham chams, sweet wrapped in an edible silver coating; crisp samosas straight out of streetside dhaba cookers; those never quite the same dals; prawns and roasted cashews along the Malabar coast; Jasailmer’s laapsi desert, ingredients too numerous to list; Kerala coffee, from a coffee press, especially after weeks of north India ‘instant”; Kashmiri pulao, a rice pilaf with pomegranate seeds, cashews, peppers, pineapple and papaya pieces …; drinking chai, stretched out on our charpoy on the crest of a Rajasthan sand dune, the sun just now rising on the horizon.

The chronic squeezing out of another 10 or 50 or 100 rupees from travelers, something not peculiar to India, but at least as relentless as anywhere we have been.  The aggravation and stress of this squeezing. The small-time cheating, attempted overcharging, the “friendliness” that sooner or later morphs into some “deal.”

Dysfunctional bathrooms. In 16 weeks we might have had two or three bathrooms where everything worked, more or less. Otherwise: sinks that drained onto floors, toilets without handles, showers without heads, heads without showers, cold from “Hot Water” taps, hot water from “Cold” taps, sinks the size of cereal bowls ….

Those behaviours that strike us, as strangers, as curious and particularly Indian. We ask a man a question in public (Is there an ATM nearby? Is this the bus to …?) and immediately three, five, six, eight more men are at your shoulders and in your face, simultaneously offering advice, opinions, interpretations and misinterpretations, advice on the misinterpretations, disputes over misinterpretations, special deals … until you scream something about none of this being helpful, at which point you realize everyone is giving you a concentrated “Wow, is this guy inconsiderate or what” look, and you wonder – stressed, culpable, your question still unanswered – what to do next.

A land “full of surprises.” We were told this in the first days and it has proved to be so very true, day after day. – “Yes, the bus you need leaves from this stall,” but it doesn’t and you almost miss the last of the day.  – “No, there are no seats on the train you want,” says the man at the India Rail wicket, who then gets up and walks away, perhaps for chai? for lunch? for a pee? for a chat? although another man soon arrives, sits in his place and you begin again, with a look of 67-year-old desperation, with your train reservation question (not yet quite accepting the answer you have), in response to which the new fellow scans his computer screen, stares some more, and longer still, men and women poking through your ribs and kidneys into the wicket itself, and then you hear the voice: “Two seats available. 473 rupees. Do you want them?” – A passing woman says the museum is 10 minutes walk, but it turns out to be 60.  – You spend 15 hopeful minutes studying the six page menu of a restaurant that has, it turns out, only four items “today.” – “Yes, we have hot showers” – until you hear the verbal small print the next day: “Between 5 and 6:30 a.m. on some days.” – Or “Yes, the museum is open. Yes, I am certain. I just telephoned.” – but when you reach the gates, a half hour across the city in another life-threatening auto rickshaw ride, it is Gandhi’s birthday and the museum is closed. In India, have a back-up plan.

Theyyem: turning the world upsidedown

4: 30 a.m. The full moon hangs in an Indian ink sky, looking over Edakkad village in northern Kerala. We pile out of our auto rickshaw and walk along the edge of an earthen square, the village’s Pathan Pura Temple, 15 or so metres along each side, lit with fluorescent bulbs high overhead. Shrines of different sizes and types sit on each side, each glowing in candlelight: a small building painted in red and white and glowing from a door at the top of several steps, an open shelter within which sit branches and fruit, a table with more offerings. 

Near the latter, a human-shaped figure sits straight-backed in a chair, a green sisal skirt hanging around his knees, dark lines across his white painted face, chest and arms, his eyes inhumanly large and black. A small crown is being adjusted on his head by several make-up assistants. Later he will dance into the embodiment of the god Gulikan, walk on glowing ashes, don an eight or so metre high headpiece resembling a towering narrow palm leaf, leap over a table and wheel around this earthen temple until coming to rest again in the chair where we see him now.

By full sunrise, three hours later, he and three other men, each from the lowest castes, will dance themselves from mortals into gods: first Gulijkan, then Muthapan, Thiruvappan and Karnavar, names familiar to everyone in the area. Taken over by a god, becoming god during the dance, these men-gods will listen to the wishful and the needy, and bestow assurances of good fortune on all who approach them – including men with great wealth and political power, Brahmins, men from the city who will prostrate themselves in the dust at the feet of these lowest-humans-become-god. Here – in what is called theyyem, the ceremony of theyyem – tradition, faith, ego and need turn the day-to-day ordinary world upsidedown.

Theyyem, according to the reading I have done, is a spirit-possession ceremony held during the winter months at village shrines throughout the northern Malabar region. More than 400 versions of ritual are said to exist, each with distinctive costumes, jewellery, body painting, face make-up and gigantic headdresses or mudi.

Unlike kathakali (which we experienced a few days later), where actors impersonate gods, in theyyem the shamans, always male, actually become the deity they evoke. They acquire his magical powers and, as if to demonstrate the point, perform superhuman feats such as walking on hot coals and dancing with fantastically elaborate and towering head pieces.

By experiencing the theyyem, devotees believe they can partake of the powers of the god, appealing to him, say, for a child or the healing of some ailment or good luck in business.

Theyyem is especially fascinating for this aspect: the shaman-dancer-god is always (and apparently must be) a member of the lowest caste, for instance a cleaner or part-time prison keeper, who during the theyyem season becomes all-powerful in the experience of believers. Many people approach the god for blessings, but most remarkable is the approach of the very powerful who, in all other circumstances, would very likely not even acknowledge the man-god in his ordinary life. During theyyem, however, dealers in millions and powerful officials prostrate themselves in the temple dust, touching the shaman-god’s feet, appealing for help. Interestingly, interviews with theyyem shamans (in William Dalrymple’s chapter on theyyem in his “Nine Lives”) suggest they, as regular human beings, are fully aware of this temporary  inversion of power and even delight in it.

(This kind of reversal of status and influence is, according to my copy of the “Handbook of Living Religions,” widespread across India: traditional priests, diviners and shamans, working at the outside edges of established Hinduism, “nearly always” come from the lower castes and exert considerable influence over communities and the powerful in their priestly role.)

As with other dance rituals and story-telling forms in this region, masks (face painting and worn masks), costumes (including detailed body paint as well as elaborate skirts, headdresses, bells and jewellery) and gestural movements each have great importance and are give considerable attention. Dressing and make-up can involve hours of intimate, precise and delicate activity between the shaman-dancers and make-up artists – all men – in ways that give the proceedings a distinctly homoerotic atmosphere. 

In the theyyem rituals we saw, the dancing shamans also had, or took on, what seemed to my eye a bisexual identity: in their face and upper body make-up (accentuated lips and breasts), in their  body and facial gestures, and in their hip and leg movements. Whether this is intentional and an element of the tradition, I don’t yet know, but it certainly felt as if it is.

Although we arrived in the dark at 4:30 a.m., the ritual had begun the evening before and continued late in the night. When we arrived, the musicians – drummers and horn players – were fast asleep. The first theyyem figure of the pre-dawn ritual was just being made up, the only one, incidentally, made up in the full sight of everyone present; all others were hidden from general view as their body paint and costumes were being applied, then appeared suddenly as the fully visual embodiment of a god.

Meanwhile, at this still quiet hour, the dance or temple square is being swept and reconstituted from the night before, oil candles lit, garlands of flowers set in place, masks and other props also placed just so, ready for later use. A place, a home is being prepared for the gods, just as the masking and costuming – then the dance – are like invitations to the gods to enter the body. Men pass around cups of chai to some 60 or so Indian devotees, local villagers and a few tourists. Off in the dark, fires are being built under great cast cauldrons in readiness for the hungry multitudes to arrive over the day.

During the next three hours, four shamans dance into gods, sometimes alone, sometimes together. Each dances into faster and more daring movements accompanied by louder and more intense music. The music especially – sharp staccato drum beats, blaring horns – builds an atmosphere of intensity, excitement, anticipation.

At various stages of the dance and at its finale, ten or twelve men – in simple white dhotis but with the movements of the wealthy, the powerful, like they just stepped out of fine clothes and chauffeured cars – bow in turn before the god or prostrate themselves in the dust at their feet, offering supplicating prayers along with material gifts and cash. In response, each receives the god’s hand on their head or shoulders and, we are told, assurances that all will turn out as wished.

By the end of the final dance, all the visiting Indians – a growing crowd of men, women and children – queue before the seated gods (the most orderly queue we have seen in India), each supplicant speaking to some need, each offering gifts (taken away by the god’s assistants) and each in turn receiving godly assurances.  The shamans will dance again later in the morning. The crowd, we are told, will continue to build. Something of a feast will be served.

I won’t forget this morning.

Now … thinking of this days later, it feels as if there was something toned down and modernized about what we experienced. It used to be, I have read, that the shamans rolled through fiery ashes and danced into body spasms through to god-being. Perhaps this is still the case in some temples on some nights. Our shamans, on the other hand, seemed to take a few symbolic steps in scattered ashes and their trances seemed acted, and not convincingly, at least to me. I read that there is another modernized dimension to theyyem. It has become highly fashionable among wealthy and politically powerful south Indian urbanites to bring their wishes and money to the gods, hoping for an edge, but perhaps also wanting a foot in the powers of both worlds: New India and the felt-mysteries of ancient folk-spiritual India. From what we saw, the man-shamans are pleased to oblige.

                                                

What was far more engaging for me were the theyyem preparations – lighting the oil lamps, painting the body and face of these men-gods, the powerful sense of other than ordinary energy in those masks, the meticulous, gentle transformative process of making man into shaman, the concentration approaching the ceremony. Fascinating, too, was watching the devotees’ personal appeals to the gods, the Malayalam spirit voice seeming to run pell-mell out along the god’s long black flickering tongue, the god’s cavernous speaking mouths, the supplicants’ bent heads, listening, so attentive, waiting for the needed assurance. And then there is that phenomenon of turning things upsidedown, and especially the man-shaman-god’s delight in this.

Gandhi in an unGandhian land

The day began discouragingly: an 18 km tuk-tuk ride through Ahmedabad’s canyon-streets of horn chaos, gridlock and blue exhaust out to Adalaj Vav, described as one of the most beautiful step-wells in India with its golden layered depths and exquisite sculptures, only to find a construction crew has closed and filled theses depths with scaffolding.

Next stop the Sabarmati (Gandhi) ashram.

Today a shaded and restful memorial-museum compound with fine displays, the ashram is where the Mahatma lived from 1917 to 1930. Here he held meetings with weavers and Harijans (Untouchables), discussing with them their rights and working with them to re-establish the manual textile industry in Ahmedabad.

 

It was also from here that he and 80 followers launched their 3895-kilometre Salt March against the British Salt Tax Law, a march that gathered 90,000 protestors, many of whom the British jailed. This early campaign was based upon Gandhi's principles of non-violent protest called satyagraha, which he loosely translated as "truth-force" and is formed from the Sanskrit satya, "truth" and agraha, "asking for." The British never conceded the Salt Tax Law. But the beating and jailing of the non-violent protesters received worldwide news coverage, and the subsequent satyagraha actions were a major factor in creating more social justice in India and bringing about India’s independence. The satyagraha approach also significantly influenced the American civil rights movement and many other oppositional, non-cooperation and non-violent, movements around the world.

In spite of almost 2,000 visitors a day, Sabarmati is a place of calm.  Visitors move slowly, attentively through the collection of documentary photos, Gandhi texts and descriptive commentary, all so all so clearly and stylishly, even reverently, presented in a quiet way.

One evocative room as been preserved, dusty white plastered walls, almost empty except for a spinning wheel, a thin white mattress, a few personal items – round spectacles, seamless white dhoti, wooden shoes – all the more poignant by their association with well-known photographs of an every-so-slight, erect, walking, so often walking, determined Gandhi, staff in hand.

We welcome the calmness here as visitors move with interest through the collection of photos, Gandhi texts and descriptive commentary, In another building a woman gives some kind of lesson or talk to a group of 20 year olds, then they sing something that sounds like a prayer. Two large groups of elementary-age children enter the compound as we leave. 


It’s good to see all these young people, especially amidst such an un-Gandhian new India -- its inequities and discontent easily turned into politically-incited 'sectarian' violence (here in Ahmedabad and Gujarat especially), its criminalized politics, its ever-widening industrialization and stupifying of work, its spending of billions on armaments (India is now the world’s largest arms buyer).

In this context, displayed examples of Gandhi’s voice are as refreshing and necessary as the shade trees … like his statements on ‘democracy’ [see photos], his abiding attention to independent thought and personal conscience, the right to disobey if the law is against truth, the egalitarian satisfying of essential needs and of human rights, the importance of the reflective, examined life, the idea of basing production (and consumption) on the skills of our hands and needs and health of the embodied human being ….

I have wondered since how Gandhi would have experienced this place, his ashram-become-museum. Like those documentary photos, so many of which have taken on iconic, non-historical qualities. Or the displays of selective texts, speaking to admired (and, for me admirable) principles and ideas (including his almost unique opposition to finger-printing by the state), but filtering out other thought-provoking responses (he didn’t grasp Nazi malevolence and counselled Jews and other Europeans to follow non-violence). What would be say about the reverential atmosphere at Sabarmati, the sense of Saint Gandhi? "Everybody is eager to garland my photos," he said late in life, just before being assassinated. "But nobody wants to follow my advice."

There is a fine, critical essay by Ashis Nandy, “Gandhi After Ghandi,” on this subject.

Of all Sabarmati’s photos, there was one and a type of another that especially moved me. The one is of a boy (I understand he is Gandhi’s grandson, Kahna Gandhi) pulling on Gandhi’s staff, seeming to pull him ahead, the two perhaps enjoying a playful moment, perhaps also youth taking the elder’s staff further ahead into a still to be determined future.

The other photos – the ones without the many crowds, the meetings with Indian and world leaders, the many public speeches – those others, often dark and shadowy, showing a lone Gandhi in spare homespun, staff in hand, walking, so often seeming to be walking, remembering conversations, imagining, giving shape to his ideals and his so practical social concerns, knowing against his wishes that principle and political strategy will rarely if ever come together – make me feel the necessity, the urgency of many ‘Gandhis’, as responsible individuals, as trouble-makers, as the not so quickly beguiled by new India’s glitter or taken in by this or that bully-theatre of ‘enemies’ and ‘honour’ and ‘vengeance’.

Across the country, as Ashis Nandy says, a widely celebrated ‘Gandhi’ has made Gandhi the man suffer a miserable fate. His portrait hangs in offices and homes (like guru-saint, giving protection for anything I want), a national holiday is held in his ‘honour’ (which few seem to have thought of the reasons for), and pigeons have more and more Gandhi statues on which to shit.

Meanwhile, the dangerous Gandhi – demanding, anarchistic, anti-violent, contradictory, humane, self-reflective, despiser of the modernist devotion to obsessive production-consumption, determined to give shared human power to his vision – has long been shunted to the rusting side rails of ‘independent’ and now ‘new’ India. That, more likely than in the ashram, is where you’ll find a few mavericks and trouble-makers, like Nandy himself, who take the man’s struggles seriously in their own thoughts and practice, but hardly mention the man himself.