The Journey, A Short Story by Susan Visvanathan

Chapter 1 It was a hot winter month. We don’t really think of it as ‘winter’, but that’s what the pepper traders called it, as they kept the calendar and seasons according to the language of the merchants who came from far off lands. Their boats would harbor in the ports and coves, and the traders would go out to meet them. So I lived far away from the sea, and though my husband had died when he was still young, they called me the ‘old widow’ not because I was old in years, but because because because.. who knows? Perhaps they thought that I should be thrown away like waste. Yet, in Chera country we were like vibhooti from the lamp of the Gods – they burned brightly, and we were to adorn ourselves with the ash that flecked off from ancient sooty lamps. It was always necessary to meet the King before going on a long journey. He was a large and swarthy man, a hunter, and with many lords serving him. How would I, a widow, be able to see him? We were from a hamlet of villages that he had gifted to us, and though we had arrived barefoot and hungry, he had fed us, clothed us, restored us to our dignity if not our former glory. A robber baron who had walked over the Nilagiri, he had some understanding of our journey which had not been as tortuous as his. He knew us as people who had laws and wealth, but had lost everything. The floods and droughts had followed in quick succession, and our poverty was multifold. He knew that we would embellish his kingdom with our arts, and was quick to acknowledge our usefulness. He had told my grandfather, “ I need priests. We are permitted to marry as our wish maybe, or not to marry, but our women must feel at home in our kingdom. I have loved a young girl, and while marriage is not a priority once our sambandham is over with a chosen girl, this one is a Toda girl. Now, the Namboothries leave my temples, and I must find new priests. I want you to serve me, and I will give you villages and concomitant lands to feed your people.” My grandfather was pleased by the king’s request. His job was to please the king, and to protect his clansmen and their families. Once they became recognized as subjects of the king, her grandfather would not be responsible for every family, every man, woman and child and the livestock that they brought with them from their famine ridden villages. He was pleased with the offer and immediately agreed, and the king’s bride was brought to him with a puzzled look. She wore the white and red woven cloths, her shoulders bare, her long black and silky hair neither oiled nor knotted, as was their custom. The king was besotted, neither caring who was watching or who was present. He had arranged for feasting and music, and the young girl went through the foreign rituals without comment. Outside the wild flowers had bloomed, the mango trees had blossomed, the cuckoo was loud and shrill, looking for his mate. It seemed as if the hot summer days (‘winter’ in traders’ language) would never end. At night, the storms had a velocity that frightened people, but lovers secure in each other’s arms did not think of tomorrow. This rejoicing over new homes, fertile lands, nestled next to the blue mountains, went on for many years. We barely remembered our old homes, where the peacocks called and the rice which grew, waving in the warm breeze, waited to be harvested. We did remember our gods, and the king gave us permission to build temples, so that each street had its lineage God, and we had freedom of worship. Having seen the King at his marriage, and remembering our loyalty to Shiva and Shakti, and his to Vishnu and Lakshmi, I felt immediately that he would bring me fortune. I was younger than his new Toda bride, but my gaze was on him through the new ceremonies, which neither he nor his new wife understood completely. They looked to the priests, heard the chanting, waited for the lamps and vermillion to be brought to them, provided guests with lemons, sandalwood paste and fragrant incense, and then before the rituals were over, they fled to their chambers to continue their love making. My gaze had been noticed by the King, who when he left with his bride, beckoned to me. I was only 10 years old, maybe he wanted me to be an attendant to his new bride. I shook my head, which he thought an agreement to follow him. My grandfather looked at me with a piercing kindly look, and had me married off to a boy destined to be a priest. I was married before I reached womanhood, which too came early to me. My husband’s village was Shekharipuram, named after his grandfather who was an old and benign patriarch whom everybody revered. You could say that the boy and I were strangers, chosen by our parents at an early age. Yet we came to each other as friends, exchanging curious glances, and shy smiles. He was small statured and dark. I saw in him an eager playmate, and though at first I was taller than him, as we grew older he became an athlete and was stronger, better fed, quicker than me. I guessed, in spite of his reticence, that he was interested in me. His eyes lit up when he saw me and for the first few years when we met as closely linked families at weddings, births and deaths, where rituals united us, we were not allowed to speak to one another. Years passed merely in exchanging glances, once or twice his hands touched mine, but our parents noticed and our mothers pulled us away. Of course we were related by blood, but that was encouraged in our families. We were small children but our parents knew each other, and our families had known hunger and poverty together, while walking those many miles over months and years, before we reached that place where we were fed rice gruel. How terrible those journeys must have been – bruised feet, aching backs, children crying, cows calling, and dogs barking as we passed through alien villages. To have been received and comforted with food and kind words meant everything to us. We brought with us our artisans and potters, and when we were given freedom to build houses, and land to grow food, we decorated our porches with the white rice flour with motifs which enclosed the cosmos in the austerity of the drawings. Our men earned money as land owners and priests and knew that as guests of the king, they were very welcome. There was a hauteur about them, and they kept their distance from their enslaved servants who toiled for them. They also discriminated against visitors who were not known to them by blood or kin or language, and women were usually recognized or classed by them in terms of blood and/ or marriage. I was thus a clanswoman, but also a bride. I learned to walk the tight rope of rules and expectations with some care. I thought of ‘my boy’ often, but as the years passed, the arts of cooking food, growing turmeric and ginger in our gardens, and knowing the etiquette of waiting and serving became more important to me. Sometimes our grandfathers taught us new poems and songs beating time with their hands on their thighs. Our grandmothers adorned me with delicate jasmines with a beautiful fragrance, often calling me Malli for short, or Mallika ( a Dakhni usage) as the priviliged owner of the home. I was happy and called my husband not by his name, but by a soft whisper, “Listen” , and he would obediently turn. Whenever he left our house which was in the same street as his, he would smile and say to my parents, “I will return”. But then he died. I became a widow before I could live with him, and as the negotiations for my cohabitation had already been agreed upon, I entered his house as he lay dying and remained a vassal to the family. He knew who I was, he loved me, but he was losing blood rapidly and his face was a mottled colour, and he knew he was dying. No one knew the reason for his death or why I remained silent in the long weeks when he lingered. I did not remove my marriage locket, or the jasmine flowers which I was in the habit of wearing every day, hoping he would notice me. Sleep engulfed him, and I emerged from the long period of waiting, knowing that he was free of pain and longing. But I was left with both – the sense that the smiling eager stranger who had been my husband would never see my body or lie near me, or be father to my children. He had died unknown, and I too, like other widows, disappeared into the vacuum of days without colour or fragrance. My mother- in- law was kind, so I survived. She allowed me to go home to recover, and I snuggled close to my mother and her siblings. I had left to be with a dying patient, a boy for whom I had a dreamlike but intense passion. The love I had for him bore witness for my servitude in the days to come. I was half way, between the living and the dead, hidden away from neighbours and friends. They did not know that I took my husband’s ashes with me, where ever I went. Not much had survived the sandal wood fire at his cremation: only a small concave bone from the lower spine, and a fragment of his skull from above the ear could be collected. Everything else had died with him, rendered to ash. This, with a sprinkling of holy water, I would knot into a remnant of his loin cloth, and float in the Ganga in Benaras. He had spoken of that gleaming city, and the Viswanathswamy temple there. He had heard of it from childhood and had sworn to me, to take me there. We were both laterally of the line of hermits, whose kin and memories we safe guarded. From that, came our memories and desires, and our families had walked over the mountains to Madurai, then returned to the rice lands when hunger drove us. The Kallar kings were well known to us and they too knew us as patrons of their arts. Without us, they could not wage their wars, or hunt or marry. Since it was their sisters who were lineally their rightful queens, they could choose their wives as they willed. We became their allies, imitating their habits and swearing allegiance. We women too, bearers of children were sworn to chastity if we did not marry. Barren women, widows and slaves – all of us lumped together and classified as abject. I escaped all that, because my grandfather supported me, and so did my husband’s grandfather. I woke up every morning at my husband’s home, the memories of stertorus breathing in my ears. He was not there, but the empty room spoke to me of his continuing presence. What a delight he had been to me, in the years before he died. A glimpse of him was enough to make me breathless, my mother looking at me and laughing. She knew what love was, that fish hook of desire. Then he died, and any one could see she was as hurt as I was. How could fate be so unkind? She had known him as her closest ally’s son, and together our mothers had hatched our marriage. How could our dreams have splintered so suddenly? My mother and I clung to each other, my father looking away. We did not keep the taboos, and they did not starve me, or shave my head, or deprive me of my jewelery: they merely hid me away. It was a secret: I had been married, widowed at 13, returned home at 14, stayed with my parents in an inner room facing the garden and the river, and forgotten by my husband’s people. In truth, my mother and my husband’s mother were linked by more than clan loyalties, they felt they had the right to protect me, and the men in our family did not object. Poor though we were, our fields were sufficient to feed us, and I was well versed in Vedic hymns, through the art of eavesdropping my husband’s and his father’s prayers. Reciting the prayers, though not fully understanding them was enough to pass the hours, the years. I had also woven a fragment of the shroud of my husband’s ashes, as compact as his loin cloth, and I kept it close to me, noticing if it had been moved from its hiding place. My mother remonstrated, my father tried to give it a sacred floating in the Kalpathy river, close to our home, with chants and flowers, but I snatched it back before the ashes floated away or the bone fragments dissolved in the water. That’s all I had of him, all that remained of a life, which had sworn to be as long lived as his grandfather. We cannot question it, for when we are happy we marvel at it, and when we are unhappy we hide our sorrow so as not to cause discomfort. I had the natural beauty of those who have had food and a house to live in, for our ragged journey over mountains had been quite forgotten. I was fed and clothed, my parents, and my husband’s parents believing that I carried the weight of memories. They saw me not as a misfortunate widow, but a young woman capable of love and prayers. Like a spinach plant that bears thousands of seeds, they saw my affliction as worthy of a soul transplanted in a woman’s body. I was not floated away like a dandelion seed, but yes, I was hidden away. Those who live silent lives without conversation or friendship become scholars. Their only companions are books or lessons learned by rote. I had access to both. I had sat with my husband as a child, and he had taught me everything he knew. He was a burly boy, full of laughter and an appetite for food which startled our mothers. Yet, he thought as quick as lightening, and even at the age of seven years, he could recite shlokas as easily as a young man. Whether he could understand them, we did not ask. Words rolled out of him like a river in flood. Sometimes a roar, sometime a whisper, he could modulate his voice according to need. I heard him chant with his grandfather during the blessing of the King and his buffalo loving new wife. A Brahmin was needed to strategically place the King and his bride within a framework acceptable to the people. The Brahmins cleverly placed the King as Yama pinpointing his right to the forest maiden as something sacred. As I grew in solitude, I often thought of the King. We ‘discarded’ women became sisters to everyone, and I looked out of the window. The sun was shining on the banyan leaves, the crimson flowers of the ginger were in bloom. I believed that my fate was to live in a palace. I had never experienced the thrusting carnal love of a man. The hymns that I learned always calling Shiva to me, presented life in the images of beauty and coitus. What I had not known, I could not miss. Words were enough. The poetry that was heritage through camaflouge and widowhood became my life. I spent hours every day copying out words, sometimes in the river sand, sometimes with stylus on leaves of the palmyra. No one noticed me memorizing verse, for everyone was busy with servants, harvest, or with the every day contexts of worshipping the Gods. These very Gods which appeared to me and blessed me were consorts who loved one another, played tricks on each other, ran to each other in the woods and water ways, and sometimes changed shapes so as to fulfill their lust for each other. We who were hidden away, we did not complain. It was our karma, we were told repeatedly. We were forever children, we obeyed our parents. We hoped there would be a surcease of pain, but there was not. We were guided through the mourning rituals, and not always excluded from the family. Manu’s law was a feared word, but not every family followed instructions as the priests demanded. Our familys were pretty low in the hierarchy anyway – imported mortuary priests speaking Tulu or Tamil depending on whether we had walked from the Konkan or Tanjavoor. The traders often spoke to us in either language, heavily dependent on us for mortuary rituals. They would lovingly bring the dead body from far off places, crying and beating their chest. After the cremation was over in the near by wood, the ashes were floated in the holy river Kalpathy, with cries of Shiva and Rama (we followed both). Our villages were revered, and while the king owned the temple and the land ,or his family did, we as officiants settled down to our peaceful lives, working and praying, and casting horoscopes for whoever paid us. There was nothing wrong with me and being in the company of loving old people, I learned to knit palm leaf mats, and sew and cook, and with my grandfathers I learned calligraphy and painting, along with the verses which they embodied. While the written word was not an everyday fixation, yet the iron nib and the stylus and the sooty ink came with the palmyra leaves. I became a master at inscription, copying down with my grandfathers’ supervision many things for people… genealogical horoscopes and religious verses and talismans. Whatever money I earned I gave it to them. I could smell from my grandmother’s kitchen the vegetables and pulses cooking together. Every morning I collected yellow lentils from the bush outside the kitchen door and tamarind pods from the tree. We had rice fields some distance away which was sowed and harvested by clans of chieftains who were original residents before the King gave the fields to us. He owned everything and every one, and no one demurred. Those who did not follow him, or hear the warning trumpeting of his war elephants fled to the Ay Kingdom, where they could not be traced. As a young child I had wandered through the rice fields, on the raised beds of embankments, alone or with ‘my boy’. We were often seen together arguing and laughing, running or exchanging riddles. He would save me from crabs, scorpions and aggressive dragonflies that buzzed too close. No one stopped us, we were married though not conjoined. If he touched me unerringly, a million cries of “Ayee!” rent the air from the boatmen, the women washing clothes alongside, the cowherds with their small and bony cows with bent horns, from small children writing their first letters with their teachers. The air resounded with admonishment and mutual embarrassment. Why was everyone looking at us? We had friends among the chieftain’s children who played with us hiding in the trees, throwing stones in the river, and running their hands through the harvested rice grains. All that was behind me now, my husband had died, and I was permitted to walk by the river in the early mornings or late at night when the stars had come out. My parents feared snakes and had me followed, but I came to no harm, as that part of my brain which anticipated danger had shriveled and died. I learned to address my prayers to the wilting moon, which never the less appeared sharp as a dagger. Chandran, my mother’s brother, dearer to me than any one on earth, distant, silver faced, with clouds floating in a rainbow gauze – how I stared and prayed. Earth seemed remote and the moon close, its very mountains reachable. Then it would rain, and with my attendants I would hurry home, knowing the pathways as well as any farmer. Some of their women slept on our porches, and were seen talking to our brothers and uncles. Nothing was hidden, rumors were always accepted as the bare and naked truth, and no one denied it. Sometimes the farmers’ daughters bore children who looked like neither of their parents, but there was no hue and cry. We remained guests at all time, treated with civility, and in turn providing comfort through our prayers and our knowledge systems of which we were indeed masters, keeping everything a secret in our families. We were quick to garner information from our servants and followers, but loath to part with any. The Toda princess had kept company with the king for many years before I became friends with her, Chapter 2 The princess was very much a coiffeured tribal, who refused all the meat from the weekly king’s past time of hunting. She was happy in in the palace, it was their turn after all to enjoy the beauty and the wealth. There were 9 families who were connected by blood and lineage, and seniority pronounced their turn. However, they were only karnavan, or brothers as caretakers, who had authority, but no power. This odd match of siblinghood and trusteeship sometimes made them bad tempered, as they just could not get their covetous hands on all that wealth. They could enjoy it, guard it, but not own it. Her servants brought her the thick milk of the buffalo every morning, which she drank up like a small child. In the afternoons, there would be the long naps born of sultry monsoon days, and cool winter sunshine. The King was eager that she learn their customs and wear the jewellery that he proudly brought her at every festival, and after every battle won. But he was as busy strategizing war and heading out to meet enemies and friends ( she could not yet distinguish them) . Bloody battles were continually fought among them, and the king generally victorious. He was easy to please, a quick thrust and then deep, silent sleep. He was quiet by nature, leaving poetry, song and ballads to delegates in court. He had no expectations of her except that she had to be present when he arrived. Of that the rules were fixed; be bathed, anointed, freshly clad and scented. He thought if her hair was awry, or her clothes crushed from sleeping in her soft muslin beds, that she had been unfaithful. He was slow to anger, but when aroused could be vituperative. She was afraid of him, as his deep voice had an unmistakable timbre, a shocking resonance. She never wanted to hear that low growl, that rage which could catapult the court into electric readyness. So there she was, always eager to hear of his arrival, running barefoot to rest against his shoulder, when he came back from distant lands. There was a metallic smell about him which she never asked him about. It was to do with spears, horses’ hooves and dogs. She held her breath, ushered him into their private chambers, and waited for him to emerge from the lotus pond in their courtyard, where his soldiers waited on him. He loved her, and didn’t keep a concubine, or married others as the Muslim lords he met in his campaign did, and which his brothers were used to doing. He loved only her, and she believed his words, the actions of his hungry body being tender and assertive, reciting to her that sensuous poetry that he had learned from his soldiers in war tents. He didn’t maintain any boundaries with them: he trusted them with his life, what was there to say? His jealousy was the only bar to the great love the King had for his Toda wife. He smelled her skin very carefully on arrival, noting the varied fragrances. Had there been a man masseuse among her innumerable servers, he would ask with some alarm, if he caught a hint of “polla” or raw tobacco around her. She would laugh at his expression, slipping out of her fine muslin sarong. She wore it in the Nair style: rich men who called themselves Kings were often of lesser status than their sisters, and married women less landed themselves, unless royalty was at stake which could well serve them economically. They had daughters born with them, who inherited their mother’s lands and had no claim on their father’s lands, just like their brothers. It suited everyone. Of course in her case, it was different, as she expected to bear children for her husband, who would live with them. It seemed obscure to her to send them back to the blue mountains. “Why do you crease your brow?” he asked her, as he showed her his wounds only newly healed. “I was thinking of children.” “We don’t need to bother. Just hold me, and don’t turn your face away.” “Its that time of month for me.” “Being covered in your blood will please me.” “If I was at home, I would be in a distant field on my own for five days.” “That long,” he started to laugh. The dread that she faced in being without him surfaced in her too. Life was too short, no one knew that better than her. When he had abducted her, she had not resisted. His eyes were a clear dark brown, and they had fixed her with a gaze she could not evade. Their own mixed blood was legendary – Greek, Roman, Persian and even run away followers of St Thomas. No one doubted their virtue, for they kept to themselves, and did not allow anyone close to them. Their embroidery in red and black threads was distinctive and kept the women busy through the long cold winters and the dense monsoons. The stories they told their children were always of escape and war, and their peaceful settlements where they could hide from the envious eyes of covetous merchants and warring princes. He wasn’t interested in her stories or reminiscences – that was the past – and he had nothing in common with her people. He didn’t even allow her to return to them or allow her family to visit. She cried sometimes, but there was no one to notice her tears, because after bathing, he would leave, while admonishing her always to look after herself, and settling her in the care of loving servants. She had nothing to do after that, except bedeck herself. She listened eagerly in the following days for the bugle to announce his return. They might be the richest family with lands that stretched up to the Ay Kingdom to the South, and the Chera Kingdom to the North, but Vijayanagara was bigger and always presented its oligarchic face, either through weapons of war, or gifts of diamonds for the Queen sister. While the King may have made some conquests of milk maids, honey collectors’ wives and princesses of smaller kingdoms, he never admitted it to his all powerful sister or his tribal princess. “Surely not!” he would blink demurring to the Toda princess, “If people lie, what can I do, Where I lie is my business, and its always next to you.” The occasional priests from the desert kingdom of Persia passed their castle, as did those from Golconda and Hampi. But the Toda princess knew nothing of it. It was said that she was deaf and dumb, and only smiled, but the truth was that she never bothered to speak either to the foreigner priests who had walked over the blue mountains, or to the King’s clan members. What did she have in common, a forest girl with silver ornaments chiseled by her own people? She had brought them away with her, and the king would not even allow her to look at them, as they were permitted only to wear gold and precious jewels. When she heard his bugles, she eagerly took off her silver earrings, armlets, bracelets and hip ornaments, and put on appropriate jewellery, studded with rubies. He always said on arrival that whatever she wore, distracted him, or poked him or hurt him. So as soon as they met, the soldiers and servants left to carry out their duties and prepared the banquets; husband and wife quickly shed their clothes and bared their bodies to each other, using their nails to scour each other’s body in a tempestuous passion that everyone remembered generations after. The king looked as if he would have a very long life, but the forest maiden did not. It was not the summer heat that killed her, as she was kept in the coolest of places in the palace. It was the loss of freedom, the voice of the ancestors that continuously beckoned her, the remembrance of terrible storms in the past that flooded their homes. She thought of her kin and friends, but there was no way of returning? What was it called? Exile? As a son descended from the line of the warrior, Shubhangi, her husband had nothing to fear. His great great grandfather too had married a forester, but he had been powerful and occupied the forest, and made their people vassals. The forests, the people, the produce were theirs. So the Toda Princess had arrived, and been absorbed into the palace, but not the family. They were clear about that. And there were according to her husband, princesses similar to her as the one locked up by her brothers in Gingee for her own safety, what interest could she have in war? She yawned, when he started on an off repeated story. There was their ancestress Shubhangi, who dressed like a man went to war, like Alli against Arjun.Yes, they venerated sandalwood and lime. Lemons adorned their windows, and left their fragrance on their bedclothes. The weavers were always at their doorstep, providing them with the softest of fabrics which they wore, much as they always had with sewing the edges with fine silk. How complex was the art of embroidery that the women in her village had mastered: using red and black threads, fabricating their surroundings in simple designs, which were truly symbolic abstractions. Sometimes to pass the time, she would create them on her clothes, but her maids would laugh saying “Princess, that’s what the fisherpeople who live near the streams in mountains do.” So it was fortune that she finally did make a friend – the girl from Shekharipuram ( they also had an ancestor called Shekhar, it was a common name, added to any Shiva derivative, or symbol. Chandrashekhar, it was a common name. )They, too, like their Gods were run by their strong dominant women, who were efficient, obeyed their husbands, but were able to communicate their wishes. Like the Nayaka kings, the Varmas were also considered shudras, having ancestress who were from lower castes. They had Brahminhood in some things, but for others, they were lower in status. The Toda princess was just achuth for the King’s family, and the Brahmins. She did not object – she had the love of the man she had wanted at first glance, and she didn’t care what others thought. The King was Chera in the Aykingdom, and Nembati in the Kollangode region, and Achen of Palakkad, and in Thozhivoor he became Narasimha. How could it matter to her? The general mnemonic of Verma applied equally, that was easy for her to remember. However, the King was fond of reciting the names of lineages and villages. Fortunately, he did not expect her to remember, as he could see from her vacant eyes, when he had finished recitation, that she was unable to comprehend the significance of his stories. “Potti”, he would say tenderly, and to that she would smile, and nod her head, or shake it depending on his mood. If she shook her head, that meant she agreed, but if she nodded, it meant she refused the title. That confused him, since he was by ancient lineage from Keralam, where the symbols for agreement and refusal were directly the opposite. They would stare at each other, and then go back to the mutual piercing of each other’s bodies where their cries were once more heard all over the courtyards of the palace to the shock and amusement of the young and old. What did they do to each other? That was kept a secret. They lived together as best as they could, given that they had nothing in common. Whenever some visitor asked the king, who his wife was and what was her parentage, he would mutter, “Vedda, Vedda!”. The onlookers would look surprised as the sea voyage was but 8 miles and took a day, but when had the king made this journey to the Pearl Island, known best for the flamingos who bred in the salt plains? The King didn’t see the need to answer anyone, or assuage their curiosity. She was his, he called her Achamma, and she called him Ammachi. Both terms were made up by them, because she was young enough to understand that his virility came from transcending his matrilineality. By substituting the term ‘mother’ for this heroic person, she brought out his tenderness, his love and admiration for her, and the understanding that she could truly manipulate him at every turn. As soon as she looked at him, he became silent. He looked at her with an agony that she could not quite understand. She felt only pleasure in his presence, he was hers, there was no affliction. His sweetness, his gallantry, the way he smiled at her made her happy. And yet, her longing to return to the blue mountains was larger than everything, they had together. The forest, the wild animals, even the large flying bats which twittered like birds at dusk, all of these were hers forever. Her father was short, with perfect teeth. He had lifted her up to the trees, and helped her with her weaving and berry picking, always in silence. He comforted her when she cried, and took her to her large, plump mother, whose braided hair was the delight of their clan. There was so much assurance and love, that her lost childhood haunted her. She tried to find happiness in her new world, but she could not forget her parents’ kindness. So she asked to go back, and instead, the king laughed and had all her kin brought to her as guests to their palace. They too, laughed when they saw her, bedecked in jewels, and draped in fine clothes, but after a few days, they returned to their village and she did not meet them again. She was an outcaste for them too, and no love in the whole world or what little she knew of it, could match the ardour of the king for her. After her grandfather came to see her, reciting words she no longer understood, or remembered, her longing to return to their simple hay thatched dwellings became immense. She had no idea why that was so. It was perhaps because he had always looked after her when she was a toddler. How else to explain the tears that came to both of them when they had to part. It was he who had taught her to take the buffalos to the mountain streams and to plait reed mats, to read the early morning stars before they vanished to reappear at dusk, cluttering the sky. Here, her life had become encrypted in a simple act of waiting, and to evade the title of misfortunate queen (as she had heard songs describing her thus by the temple priests), she kept silent, like her husband’s sister, the Queen. Like her, she would speak only when spoken to. Who would approach them? Their lines had to be kept separate, and the king was careful to address her as Princess, as only his sister had title to “Queen” and every one called him Karnavan, since the title itself was mobile, divested at death, and not passed onto his son. When the Princess thought of the blue mountains, the peaks and ridges disappeared into the clouds, the rivers were clean and unnamed, the air had a quality the gap in the mountains could not match. They were by no means poor, and their patchwork past had consolidated into rule bound lineages who made sure that by isolation they could keep their customs and the black cows pristine. They depended on the Kotas for their music and earthenware pots and toys, and to the ridge climbing honey collectors, the Kurumbas, for the sweet balm they needed to make their medicines. For the rest, they were foragers, not eating meat, but content with their forest berries milk and cheese from their buffalos and their grasses producing varied cereals, whose names they knew by rote, which when harvested, kept them going through the long cold winter. “For us everything was a secret we were not allowed to tell. When the hunter brought me to the plains, he but did not know that that secrecy was our only true possession. My family was afraid when they came to know that I had run away. But then the songstress from Wayanad told them they had seen me in the courtyards of the palace and they were relieved. Of course I did not know how the king managed to get our entire encampment to move out and reach our palace. These kings and their chiefs by threats on embellishments, they do rule. My parents said that his great grandfather had done the same, and taken all their land to be his own, so they were not surprised when they were moved down to the searing hot plains. But they are also linked to the best metal smiths, so Kollengode was a good place for them to see, and some clansmen didn’t return. As Princesses we are kept only to be fed, and ornamented, and sit at heavy laden tables to distribute food to those who are loyal to the king. “ Her listeners, who gathered often to hold her hands and hear her stories were pleased by this account. They were always afraid that she would run away back to her people. The King paid many people both men and women to keep a careful eye on her. His thoughts were always on her, with her, creating a definite filament bridge of desire between them. He could feel her arms around him, when he was riding and like all his forbears, he was given to long rituals, and memorized chanting. Then, too, he believed that she kept him company. The Gods didn’t object, and the intensity of his prayers of gratitude were such for his good fortune, that he confused the Goddess to whom he prayed, and his wife, whom he imagined to be by his side. War was like a habit, he wielded the sword like a machete in the grass, not hearing cries of pain, or pleas for mercy. That he survived was truly a card of fortune, because enemies ringed him at every turn. So should he befriend Golconda or Vijayanagara? He was emotionally ringed by worship of Durga, and adulation for his wife whom, too, he had deified at sight. So he had to make his choices by intuition and desire, and most importantly logic. He closed off his ears to his wife, while in battle, only too eager to couple with her, the only human that he saw as his redeeming soul, this gentle deer like creature, who dwelt perpetually in his body and mind. Even as the days passed swiftly in the company of her beloved husband, Achamma the wife of the King regretted her birth and marriage simultaneously. She was wracked by guilt and longing, for her love of the holy mountains, the place of her birth, her ancestral cult became more than she could bear. She needed to be in the cloud country, where the fierce rains of the mountains made them understand that wealth and poverty went side by side. They understood that fate ruled them. The stars were thousands of miles away, but by their flitting light ordered their universe. Here, in the hot and dusty plains, the bullock carts and the Naika horses and mules from Hampi, threw up a continuous dust. She was afraid of the power of the great kings, of which her husband was one, constantly disputing and contesting the boundaries of their terrains. Her tattoos were gradually fading causing her immense agony. Once they were there to remind her of her lineage and the promises for the future that the Gods had made to her parents for her well being. The tilling of land, the presence of the dairy, the cattle wallowing in the pond, that had been her heritage. Now, in the King’s palace she looked at the huge trees bequeathing them fruit and shade. She should have been pleased. Pepper vines had been transplanted and wrapped themselves around pala trees. For her, the days passed dream like. There was the everyday existence which involved waiting interminably for the Lord to appear, the King as he was called. Nobody ever told her where he was, or where he lived. She had never visited his apartments, or was escorted to them. He was aloof when she asked. And she knew that if she persisted, he would discard her. What was the distinction between being an unfortunate princess and a slave? She realized that by thinking about it, she lost her appetite and was unable to carry out her duties, which were many. When he said that there was a Queen like her in the hill town of Gingee, she was perplexed. What did he mean? He was nonchalant. “We’re kings to some, and soldiers to others.” “What?” “They hire us to fight their wars. We appear when summoned.” “You mean the Rayas.” “Yes.” He fondled her hair, and helped to take off the heavy gold anklets and chains and bracelet that she had put on, only on hearing of his return. They were young, he had many years before him, why worry about the future? He looked at her carefully as she lay on the bed…then he stopped to gaze at the sky. It was a pallid blue, as the birds screamed in the summer heat. Monsoon was over, summer was back. “We are going on a campaign to Delhi, to escort the Rayas. We lost the war, and now we must pay the cost.” “When will you return?” “Perhaps never.” She sat up dazed. “I shall not burn myself. It is not our custom.” “Is that all you have to say?” He started laughing. He found her pretty in an austere way, and amusing, like a doll that lay docile in interim spaces before he rode off to war. Nothing really belonged to them, they turned their defeated peoples into tenants, and more powerful lords made them, in turn, their obedient vassals. There was life and there was death. She got up and fled to other rooms in their apartment. She could hear him desultorily asking, “Where is my lady?” But he was tired from riding for many nights and fell into deep sleep lasting many days, waking up for short intervals for food and drink and ablutions. She who had been waiting for many weeks for his return was disappointed, but this was their life together, absences and sudden fulfillment. It was not as if she questioned her fate, or his love for her. Every time he appeared in her chambers, her heart opened up to the new vision, the new hope (never realized) that he would stay. Since there were no competitors to her affection, she took his shield and spear, and his sandals inside the palace herself, secreting them from view till such time as he asked for it. She oiled his body, checking for new wounds, till such time as his guards called him for his bath. The days passed swiftly, and before she could draw breath, he was gone again. It was the other life that kept her occupied. True, it was her dream life, in which they returned to the blue mountains. As they were the defeated people, the poor and the forgotten, descendants of Porus who lost the battle with Alexander, they lived in hiding. They were of the oldest peoples of the land, but they found that those who desired them, would come in search of them, just as the King’s father had, and then him, the hunter-lord. They needed to hide from these vagrant kings who took their lands, their sheep, their black cows. They had never imagined that their hiding places were visible to these-would be marauders, who seeing their beautiful women would change their minds and seek to settle in their forest villages. So as the generations passed they hid themselves even further in the woods, and swore to their purity of blood. In turn, the new adventurers stole their women, and she was one such. When she returned to her dream world, cast in the hues that the sweet incense her servants provided her, she was always alone, a child entwined in the leaves of forest creepers, with scented flowers. She was alone, forever alone, and being one with the cosmos, she neither feared, nor demanded, or desired anything. It was that bliss of aloneness that she returned to when the King left her. The scented incense made of dried roses and jasmines made her drowsy. The King had asked the soldiers to ensure that it was not opiated, as he found her to be inattentive when they were lit. He had news of her wherever he went, however bloody the battle, his thoughts were on his wife, and the possibility of his return to her. It did not make him less valorous, but on the contrary there was a detached and deadly reserve about him which made him a terrible enemy. Not for him the distraction of casual coitus or the soft beds of an accompanying harem. His motto was “To Surrender is to Sin” and so his victories were well known, and when in need, he retreated and extended his life. “We are what we are!” he would say softly to his wife. His silence would be disturbing, and she longed for the words that calmed her, but he had none. “Why speak when everything is known?” he said quietly. But she knew nothing, and when he did not return from war, she entered that cavern of solitude from which there was no return. Chapter 3 He will come back” the petite, fair, fat, sweet Brahmin widow had said to her. “How?” “He will send word.” “He sent you to me to comfort me, I know that, but I do not believe you.” “He will return, I promise you.” “What news do you have of him?” “Only what my grandfather told me.” “What did he say?” “They have crossed the Narmada.” “Narmada.” “Its in the forests of the Deccan.” “The black soil reaches up to there?” “The sal trees and friendly peoples who know of you will help them, my grandfather said.” I knew, then, that my husband’s ashes would be safe. The girl who was the Toda princess, Achu they called her, looked at me in gratitude. She did not know how I as a young widow had joined her retinue. All she knew was that she had been left alone in the company of an amused community of village maids, who thought of themselves as of higher caste than the Toda princess. Ideally they would not like to have been servants to her, but they were too poor to object. She was after all a human being, not the tigress on whom their warrior Goddess rode. While she didn’t speak their language or know their customs, yet her sweetness and innate courtesy to all, made court life easy. She did not shut herself up, she roamed freely, even looking into soldiers’ chambers without guile. They understood her, and never reported to the King, how she knew every room and every street in the palace grounds. Though lonely, she was secure. Everyone understood that the King adored her, and protected her with his life. She never asked Lakshmi Amal to explain her presence in her retinue. But there it was, word got around and the maids who surrounded her were not so secretive with rumors. Lakshmi had escaped from her parents and grandfather. She had found life alone in her dead husband’s house very hard. It was easier to secret herself in the woods, than live in a house where her husband never returned. And of course, she was a polluted one. Not only was she a widow, but she carried her dead husband’s ashes in her waist band and could not be parted from it. Did the Princess know of this odd sepulchral habit, the maids asked her. “No. My husband did not tell me any thing.” “She stood at the gates when he was riding past. She stood in his path. They seemed to know one another. He recognized her, and waved her in, and shouted at the guards to allow her to in your retinue, as a companion.” “And how can that be?” “ If you know these landlords, then you also know their villagers well.” “Is she the child who was at out wedding? I do remember her. She came with her grandfather. I noticed the king nodding at her, but thought that they must have some link, maybe a sibling bond. Perhaps once our sambandham was over, my Lord must have thought she could accompany us to our chambers, a small child who would entertain us with her chatter and tricks.” “Oh no, Princess! Her grandfather married her off immediately not wanting the King’s attentions. They are his guests. Nothing was entertained by them, their women are antarjyathis, hidden away from sight.” “Don’t they get bored?” “Oh no, they learn prayers.” This simple answer confused the Toda princess. Well, she would have enough time to ask the young woman. There was a fearlessness about Amal, she had that quality of being loved and pampered all her life. The hardness and grime of widowhood and scavenging and being unwanted had passed her by. It is true that she had run away from her fate, which was most unusual, but who knows what her reasons were? She would ask Lakshmi Amal herself. She got the opportunity for a few months later when they were reading together. The language of priests, the secret language, forbidden to them had already been learned. Everything forbidden is available to those who are hidden away or are mendicants. They only had to find the right teachers, and sometimes the search itself took years. But in the King’s household, there was a Christian priest who was a magician and a martial arts teacher. He had been able to meet the Princess and the Brahmin widow, not in secret, but openly, in their chambers. The gift of mutual friendship was bestowed upon them by the King himself,f who was able to read the Samskrit and the Vattelu scripts and had taught them to his wife. He had left with the Raya kings knowing that his bride would be insecure, so to keep her company, the Christian and the Brahmin widow were hired. True, it was strange, but he told his companions as he rode away, “We keep to the rules and customs as best as we can, but to be free, we must allow others their freedom.” There was a certain foreknowledge that allowed the King to understand that sight and venom made for war – and to substitute for that there was a bed of nails. Why tell the young girl that? What they shaped together as lovers would run through many life times. They would always recognize one another, however often they pierced their ears as custom demanded to allegedly befuddle the memory of the past. Nothing stood in the way of their languor and their lust for one another, they would find a way to one another. Escorting the Raya Princes to Delhi was not a new task, as long as the Deccan Kings ruled there would be victories and defeats alternating with one another. Sometimes they went as prisoners, sometimes as escorts to visitors demanding compensation from greater lords for men lost in war, and demanding booty in return. In the constellation of Kings, these warriors served so many masters, so often, they accompanied one another to retrieve their losses. Sometimes the King was paid in diamonds, emeralds and gold, and these he brought back for his Toda princess, who accepted with a laugh, putting them on to please him. He could not distinguish between the Goddess Durga and her, as both were equally dear. She was his daughter – wife and her very presence brought out in him the gentlest and sweetest emotions, ever ready to please her, quelling his arrogance and self pride. To see their King so quiescent pleased his court. They felt that they could enjoy the peace that was suddenly rendered to them in the palace. They strove to please him, and kept away messengers of war. And to their amusement, the Princess never enquired “Who won the war?” His absence for the year that followed created a furore. For her the days extended without end. Although the lovely Brahmin girl kept her company and was ever cheerful and compliant, offering her food and talking nonstop when she thought the Princess was going to cry, it made no difference. “He will return.” “He said he had no plans, fate will decide.” “They all say that.” “He didn’t turn around and say goodbye.” “The permission to leave was already given by you, in silence, that night be he teased you.” “You heard us?” “Everyone hears what you both say. Its not just that the wind carries your words.” “The Queen knows where he is now?” “She too has no word, though she has spies everywhere.” “Maybe he is dead.” “My husband is dead, and he still lives in my heart.” “Maybe he is dead!” “I have said that I have lived without him for these many years, but have vowed that I will float his ashes in Kashi in the Ganga.” “What a strange thought. You will never be permitted. We were not allowed in the Dairy in our forest village. What makes you think that your people will allow the widow of a dead priest to travel across from our land to the sacred river of birth and death and renewal?” “The King has promised to help me.” “You asked the King?” “Yes, when he asked me to give him the favour of accompanying you everywhere. The Queen, his sister was not pleased when she heard of our exchange of promises.” “It is only I who do not know of these abstractions and promises.” “It is nothing, my lady, just words.” “Words have power. Our priests would swear, dance and milk the black cows with sacred words, never allowing women near them. We had to use two rivers for the purpose – one set apart for the Dairy and the other for our every day needs.” “I am without a home, and you very kindly allowed me to stay.” “ To tell the truth, I didn’t notice when you came. And we became friends as soon as you spoke to me. I did not know these secrets between you and my husband. A widow. And carrying a dead man’s bones like loose coins in your pocket.” “Don’t speak like that, Devi, I will lose my courage, and when the King returns, as surely he must, then I will leave.” With that, Amal left the room, saying sadly that they could only talk about Death together that was their destiny. For her, the presence of those whom she loved were always with her. Their voices and their remembered kindnesses accompanied her through the days’ pleasant chores. She was in charge of so many of the personal belongings of the Toda princess. It was thought that because she was an ascetic chosen by the King, it was safe to break the ritual customs. Chapter 4 “We are humans, polluted by the fact that we return to Earth in a new form, enlivening our bodies by the catapulting of a dead spirit brought to life. So we cannot deny that we too are forever polluted by our past desires, and our unattained ambitions.” The Queen was quick to defend her brother, to the heartbroken princess, lambent in her misfortune. Sometimes in the quiet stillness of her heart, Achu sensed that her attendants were sorry for her. She had everything, and yet her love for the King was a mantle too heavy to bear. Her grandfather had walked for four days, old man though he was and had come to meet her. His face was wrinkled by age and the seemingly never ceasing droughts, for forest fires had arisen, and streams dried up. They did not know from one day to the next whether they would see the sun rise on the holy mountain, so piteous was their condition. And then the rain had come with such ferocity that the people blamed him for the terrible nature of the storms. They wished to tie him to an old sprawling tree with iron chains, saying it was he who had brought them to this fate by permitting his granddaughter’s marriage. He hadn’t even known about it, till the King had forcibly gathered them all to settle around his palace. They had accepted courteously and left very soon The Palace guards had seen the naked forester who wore only the spathe of the coconut tree around his waist. Recognizing him as the Toda princess’s kin, they allowed him in. She ran to hug him, but his bones were so sharp that she withdrew from him. He carried the same odour of cloves and cinnamon that she remembered as a child. His wrists and ankles carried the signs of his manacles. He was weeping and destitute. For the seasons, and for poverty there was no solution. How could she help him? Before they could attend to him, he died of the terrible heat that he had absorbed on his journey from the mountains, his scrawny limbs exposed in the last rattle and upheaval of death. The Brahmin woman kept away from the Toda princess’ quarters for many weeks after that. And she did not ask about her. It seemed to her that there was no solution to disaster and loss. One had to accept it, or as in her case, turn her face away. She had been asked to keep the Princess company, but the odour of ancient death remained in her rooms. Her squalor was hard to bear. She neither bathed, nor ate. It seemed to her that she was the cause of all the difficulties her people were facing. She could not bear to be away from them, and she thought that the King would not return. Running away from the castle was not possible – she was surrounded by too many people who were loyal to the King. Her grandfather, though he had walkd twenty five miles a day was in good shape when he arrived. Wizened and cheery, he had brought her toys, and rice which had been made into round balls with jaggery, crisp to the tongue, with a delicate fleck of anise. She had been so pleased to see him, it drew tears to her eyes. She flashed him a wide smile, the beads of joy glittering like jewels at the end of her sharp nose. He smelt of sweat and arrack, and though he was apologetic, his perfect joy in her company was palpable to all. Somehow, they were aware that everyone was watching them, exulting in his nakedness and poverty. Word would have reached the King of his wife’s grandfather’s arrival as runners (messengers) who stood at every village border were quick. The old man had visited the King’s family shrines, and had made simple offerings of flowers. The one he had spent most time at was in Kalpathy, where a very large, very heavy Shivalingam had been found, while the King was bathing. He had pulled it out from the mud and installed it. Here, people gathered to make votive offerings to Shiv and Visalakshmi. The King always had food ready, and simple though it was, people gathered to pay the Lord homage, and to remind others of their subservience to the King. How simple life was, the old man had thought…rice, coconuts, pumpkins and gourds everywhere grew so easily. There was never any struggle. Exultation was in every breath. How comely the women were. Not as beautiful as his mother and grandmother, but still he could not stop staring. All of them seemed to be bathed in milk and covered in rubies. Her grandfather had thought he was in heaven when he drew his last breath. He had thought that he would gift her a son with his sorcery, though she had laughed and said here, daughters were preferred; but his emaciated body had not withstood the long journey. He did not know he had died, but he had seen the look of joy in his grand daughter’s face and understood that love did not change with circumstance. What he had seen on her attendants’ face had shocked him. They saw a famished destitute old man, and when he suddenly crumpled at his grand daughter’s feet, from an excess of joy, they all screamed and shouted for help. The Princess knelt and held him close, hearing his wavering heart beat echo with her own galloping loud one. “Do something!” she wept. “Yes. Princess. We have asked for the Doctor.” ‘He is not breathing.” “His age is such, Princess.” “The Doctor.” “It will take some time to reach his rooms as they are very far from yours.” “Cannot any one help?” “If he is already dead, what can anyone do, Princess?” “Where are my soldiers?” “My dear Princess. Our very own Princess. They will arrive.” “Now! Find them now” “He is dead, Princess. Nothing for us to do, but wait for the cremation!” The Doctor arrived. He was a slim haughty man, who never the less, produced a ready smile for his patients. When he saw the condition of the Princess, he had her moved to her bed, and gave her medicines and oils, and called in the masseuse, and had water heated with aromatic herbs for her bath. He looked cursorily at her grandfather, and said he would have the King informed. There was no need to do more. The physician then left. Death was an abject condition, the servants would know what to do. Lying in her bed, ignorant of everything except that her grandfather still lay crumpled on the floor where she had run out to greet him, the Princess felt that life was a hollow bamboo in which they were forced for a duration of time. Then they were breathed out into the cremation fire, or in the loamy earth. The Goddess Terkahsi would be present as the ashes and remnant bones would decompose into the earth. Would she able to take the ashes back to their village? She cried bitterly. There was no one to hear her. She saw that the Doctor had sent a bier of green leaves for her grandfather. She tried to leave her bed to give instructions of how he had to be placed North-South as was their custom. They were already doing it. She could see them from her bed, shutting his eyes with gold coins and straightening his limbs before the irrevocable stiffness of death set in. It was only she who was paralysed with shock, unable even to move her hand. No one looked towards her. The soldiers too had arrived. One of them was saying, “Everything must be a secret. No one must know where his ashes are buried in the forest.” The Princess ‘ racing thoughts and her still body were in tandem, though pulling in opposite directions. So, there was some one in the room who understood their customs. Her tears were still running like rivulets, streaming down her face. Every moment of childhood returned to her in memory. Then she heard the soldiers lifting the bier. She glimpsed the tilt of the leaf ornamented bamboo raft and saw her grandfather’s face for the last time. He looked peaceful. Then they were all gone, and the room was empty. She could still hear her grandfather’s voice, and longed for the moment when as a little girl, she was carried aloft on his shoulders to see the Dairy. The moon was up, the crickets were chirping very loudly, and through the circular door he showed her the buffalos before they were milked. “You are a little girl so I shall say the rules don’t apply.” “Shall I tell my father and mother?” “No, don’t tell anyone, its our secret, we only peeped through the bushes, even the goats do that.” Chapter 5 The Palakkad Raja returned to his home, and the Brahmin widow left for Kashi wih her husband’s ashes. No one noticed she had gone. It was raining, and she secured an elephant and a mahout for her journey, following them in a wagon driven by two ponies escorted by a soldier that the King had commissioned when he came back from the war in Hampi. They had enough hay to feed the animals and would refurbish supplies at every small town they stopped at. Though the rivers were flooding, seeing Amal to be a royal traveller with servants, possessing the king’s seal and money, they were permitted to rest every night in the homes of chieftains. The trio of female ascetic, elephant, mahout and wagon driver travelled fast, and they had no need of weapons and never lacked food. A royal pilgrimage! People came out of their houses to felicitate them with garlands which the elephant ate at night relishing the rose petals and mint leaves. The monsoon rains dwindled as soon as they crossed the Palakkad gap in the mountains, and they never looked back. Why was she travelling so far? Surely Basava had announced and Adi Sankara before him, that everything was a “one-ness”. It permeated the body and the cosmos. But for Lakshmi Amal, her love for her husband had entered the annals of memory. The King would provide her protection as he had messengers lined along the route, and she would bring back to gift him as tribute whatever alms she collected on the way. Seeing the elephant, neither tigers nor robbers attacked them. They were assured safe passage for the year and a half they travelled, stopping every night and resting in the hot afternoons. After they reached the blue mountains, the mahout died of the bitter cold and their elephant ran away, and they, (the wagon driver and Amal) were bereft not knowing what to do. But after three months of prayers and missed opportunities, the King sent a local mahout and another elephant. They could give no orders to the new mahout, as he was a soldier, but he was loyal and faithful to the King’s orders. Wars divide territories and people, but messengers could also be allies. The King had passed this way before retreating to his palace and the spontaneous ardour of his mating with the Toda princess, or so they were told. Lakshmi Amal woke up in the morning in the fisherman’s hut. The river was flowing smoothly and the bird songs were loud, a symphony of alternating sounds. The air smelt clean, a monitor lizard with red eyes was basking in the sun. He looked contented, having had his fill of insects. She walked warily past, not catching his gaze. The heat was over powering though the sun had barely risen. She would say her prayers by the river, cook her simple meal of rice, gourds and lentils all in one pot, on a fire built over stones. It was the only meal that she permitted herself. Her companions both ate well of the fish that their host had caught at dawn, and cooked for them over the embers. They were both large men with appetites that startled her, and she kept out of their way till they had whittled the fish, cooked and eaten it. The toddy seemed to swill out of wayside shops, as they stopped often. Soon they would be out of Chera country, the Nilgiris far behind them. Already the terrain was replete with the fronds of palms, very different from what she was used to. The red gravel was gritty under her feet when she stepped on it, and the rice fields gave way to millets and yams. The people were swarthier, bedecked in silver jewellery unknown in design to her people. They could however understand one another and the women came out to sit with her, as she sat in her damp clothes, stirring her gruel which was slowly cooking over a fragrant fire of damp green wood, buttressed with dry hay. “Your husband allows you to travel alone in the company of these two fellows?” “I am a guest of the King!” “Which King?” “Palakkad Raja!” “That fellow! The hunter who married a young Toda girl!” “Yes, that one.” “What does he give you?” “Safe passage.” The women made some lewd remarks and moved away to cut grass for their cows. She did not tell them she was a widow. They were poor women, but judgmental of those who did not fit into their framework of expectations. “Why was she wearing rings, ear studs and a nose ring if she was widowed?” one curious bystander had already asked her escorts this question. “As a disguise to fend of questions from women like you and the overtures of strangers who want to seduce or marry me!” Amal had said when her servers reported this to her. Now, she could hear the unspoken thoughts of the grass cutters. “And you think the disguise has worked? We know you to be a loose woman. Only those who are capable of misdemeanor dress like you. Men will offer you money, and you will accept it. There are no children with you. Your marriage locket is tied on a thread and not on a gold chain. Shame on you.” Amal could hear them through their silence and their raised eyebrows though not a word had been said between them. Silence was her constant companion. They took a boat to the Pearl Island after crossing forests and deserts of scrubland, where nothing grew, but temples to Shiva and Shakti emerged in arid zones. When they saw the turquoise river going steadily to the sea, Amal’s heart filled with joy. They left the elephant and his mahout to meet them in Kashi, and with the ponies embarked on their first sea journey. Having spent considerable time, exchanging their consignment of pepper with flawless rubies in Lanka to take back to the King, they set out yet again to sea with a consignment of good cinnamon. Taking many months along the peaceful Bay they reached the prosperous Eastern coast port of Tamraliph. From there to Varanasi was a simple route, where people were hospitable to traders and foreigners. Chapter 6 Having reached the Pearl Island, I lived there, with the taciturn bullock cart driver and all the valuable paraphernalia we had carried for many months. As the elephant and the mahout were wandering over the hot plains, and the rugged Vindhyachal mountains I saw no reason to hurry. The sea was blue and the people were kind. We were lucky not to have been crushed by the waves as there were signs of ship wrecks both on the coasts and the sea. I was glad to be there, as the spice trade was flourishing and so were the people. We understood that we were foreigners to them and so kept a shadow profile, coming out of our huts only when the moon was out. And yet, and yet, keeping the ashes of my long dead husband close to me, I was rewarded by happy memories of our childhood together. It is true that he was sick for many years, and had stopped speaking to me altogether, but that sudden flash of his smile was sufficient for me. Even in the days of acute suffering we understood each other. He knew I was in pain over his imminent loss, and he was on the other hand, overcome by joy by the conflagration of love that consumed him. Now, after many years, I was pursuing the moon, and was guided by the stars. If we were steadfast, we would reach the holy land of our ancestors, where the river flowed in a vast expanse of blue. I did not need much by way of food, and my sole companion was the king’s soldier, Vignesh, who drove the cattle we had brought on the ferry. The two bullocks who would make our journey simple over land, and the white calf and her mother who fed us sufficiently travelled with us. We had sold the ponies but swore to ourselves to buy them back as horses were good currency where ever we went.. We had lentils and red rice with us in plenty, and showed the King’s seal whenever we needed to. We had heard from the King’s messenger at the port at Kandy, that our young elephant had been wounded by tigers in the forest, and had been lost, but the mahout Arumugam was alive and well, having hidden in the boughs of a tree. He was waiting for the King’s instructions and had been told to wait in the temple in the town, till another elephant had been arranged. I had cried a lot when I heard this news. That leathery hairy skinned creature had been our friend and companion, eager for the bananas I fed him, smiling with his sharp bright eyes and opening his mouth, while waving his trunk, his ivory tusks revealing his age. Life is a continuous embellishment of hope, and then a plummeting into the dark trough of woe. I felt that if I remained on one place I would be swamped by tears and lost. There was no haven in grief. So I collected my belongings and thoughts, left the glade of cool trees and bright moonlight with its many temples to Hanuman, and moved onwards. Kalinga too was a subterranean battle site. After a peaceful sojourn of many weeks out at sea, stopping at any harbor where the King’s golden seal was recognized and purchases possible, we completed our long journey from the Pearl Island to Kalinga without difficulty. Of course, we paid in pearls, while hugging the coast, and our own valuable pepper was another form of currency which we hid under the hay boughy for the cattle. This interaction between strange and unknown peoples was hard for me. I had for so long been an antarjati (dweller of the innermost chambers) both spiritually and physically, living in my own world, dreaming at night of unknown people and of the past, time galloped along. Sea journeys were pleasant, and I was lulled and rocked by the boat. As a widow, my food was usually parched rice, lentils, and occasionally the wild berries on land. Since I had not known marriage, I did not experience widowhood. When people asked where my husband was, I replied truthfully, “Travelling in unknown lands.” When they asked, “When will he return?” I pointed to the skies, and said “Lokasanchari, it is not known.” I had not seen his body burn; that lovely lithe boy was always mine. The fulfillment I received in his company, and the delight that I remembered so well was the habit I covered myself with. No, not a shroud, just a remembrance of his ardour. When I floated his ashes in the Ganga at Kashi, I would be free. The King had promised me the valour of his soldiers on duty. A widow was fair play, so he had threatened death to his men, should I be harmed. I received comfort from that and walked barefoot and brave. Actually, the bullock cart and the ship were well endowed with rugs and pallets and sedan chairs. The mahout who had gone ahead of us would meet us in Kalinga and with an even younger elephant. The King had no money to give us. I carried none myself other than for trade and tribute, but services were assured as we progressed on our path. I was not in the habit of speaking with Vignesh. He was a quiet man, ready with his sword. He made it clear that his duty was a burden. He had no idea why he had been chosen. He spoke to me in sign language, usually cursory in its motion. He felt that his valour was quite wasted on a puny woman like me. I had heard him talking to his friends, while they drank under the stars. “ She is a weak and foolish one. Who could care for her?Her voice is light, and she has enticed the King. Why else would he set a whole train for her, palanquin, elephant, horses, cows, bull and its progeny, the white calf. Tell me, what has she given him in return?” “Just my friendship,” I said softly, though they could not hear. The eagerness we serve the Gods is beyond comprehension. I cannot explain that the moment he saw me, he knew I would be of use to him one day. Immersed in battle from year to year, he needed a companion for his young wife, the Toda Princess. Now that she is dead, I am free, and he wishes to repay me for the many years of service. I ask for nothing – he paves my path, and he knows that I will bring him untod riches from Kashi. For us, Benaras is the gleaming city, the city of light, withheld from most by distance. It is because I am bequeathed with a second vision, that I can see beyond the present, I can conceive the future. I can ask and I receive. From the King I see the signal to “keep distance.” I didn’t mind. To him, I was polluted, being a widow, and his manners were tailored accordingly. Sometimes I laughed softly to myself thinking of happy days. He thought widows should not be amused, or show emotions or have hobbies or travel by water. The fact that we took the ship was itself because of the kindness of the Samudran who had a boat with Christians and Mohammadans on it. Loss of caste was not an issue for soldiers, and so they were protected. They went where the King told them, and slept on stones, and climbed trees on seeing a tiger. However, he was a gentle person in his own right, and while he used sign language with me, he spoke at length with those whom he had to deal with. I had heard, in the old days, through the thin curtains that separated the royal couple and me, long stories about battles in distant lands (actually, to tell the truth, in kingdoms which were just two nights march away.) With the King were accompanying kin, other brothers who had sworn loyalty and fealty to one another as comrades. In war and in death, there was a feeling of equality and moments were measured by eternity. It was not that she was afraid because of that particular torpor of death, of which she had acquaintance. Terrible things had happened to Amal in childhood. Ten years had passed in keeping house for the King’s wife, whose life was like that of any other princess marooned in war. What was there to hope for? The end could only culminate in the fire which burned memories and will rise in incandescence before the rot of old age set in. Here she was in Kalinga, where the bodies of thousands of soldiers lay till Ashoka’s wife had threatened him with conjugal abdication. The breeze blew, the trees were green, and the leaves whispered. There was nothing to fear. Madness visited some people when they were wronged or felt they had lost everything. In her case, she felt the hollowness of time, the sense that life itself was drilled moment by moment by the cacophony of desire. How could she interpret the King’s love for his Toda wife and the beneficence of good will toward her? Had she really caught his eye when she was a small child? Yes, he had smiled at her and beckoned. But she remembered him as a full grown man given to war fare and hunting, and seeing the exchange of glances she had been very quickly married off to a known youth. And then when at fifteen her husband had died, and the years of being secreted were over, she had been sent away by her grandfather to be companion to a lonely princess, though everyone was told that Amal had run away from home to the woods. From there, she had advanced in years and etiquette to actually to be indispensable to the court. It was not her plump and vacuous beauty that set her aside, it was her ability to give orders on behalf of the Toda princess. Everything had to be perfect, and from gardeners to cooks to the masseuse who gave baths to the royal couple, the young widow was in charge. Since her marriage had not been consummated, the interrogators to her presence in court always sidestepped her inauspiciousness. She was a young woman, more high born than the courtiers, a favourite of the king, her antecedents not quite known. It was as if the King’s love for her was an unspoken bond between them. He did not speak, or ask her questions, but when he returned from the sporadic wars that he went on, he was ever grateful. What was her name: he was never very sure. Still, in the exchange of glances, the affectionate tone, she knew the King held her in high esteem. When Amal asked permission to make the long journey to Benaras, he was wrapped in his wife’s shawl… that red and black mosic weave on white, and he merely nodded his head in acquiescence. She wasn’t sure that he really saw her, and when his eye met hers, he generally looked away quickly. Yet, yet, it was as if they recognized each other, embarrassed by the love that flew between them, lighting no sparks, not even hinting at concupiscence, but always present. If there was mutual love, it had no future, but she was not going to shrug it off. She was there to serve his lady, and was willing to die for her. Now all that was in the past. She could only move forward, there was no return except in memory. She often recited her prayers with the image of her patron the King in her mind. He was big, burly, strong, dark skinned and of contested origins. She realized that because he had saved her life, and given her a new one, she was ever beholden to him. After all he asked nothing of her, and while journeying he made every anchorage safe for her. One did not win wars out of rectitude, but because there were among warriors, a mutual acceptance of benefit and usury. The King knew everyone everywhere, and once he clapped his hands, people sprung up from odd corners to execute his will. She felt lucky that she, Lakshmi Amal was in his favoured circle of courtiers – a mere servant, definitely not a courtesan, but a close and trusted aide. The young elephant, so tender in years joined them at Kalinga with the weary mahout, who did not know how to tame him. “By the time his tusks grow, I will know, if I am not dead by then” he said loftily. Meanwhile, they gathered their belongings into the cart with their bullocks and cows, and walked for many months on well trod pilgrimage roads to Varanasi. The elephant teetered along, hardly providing dignity or majesty to their very minimalist entourage. Who were they, after all, only three religious people going to sign a ledger at Varanasi? None of them could write Pali or speak Bhojpuri. It was 1390 by traders’ calendar , 490 Malayalam era by their own, so the King’s seal, and their names would be inscribed for curious souls to know hundred of years later, that they had been present in the holy city of Benaras. For the three of them, travelling in silence together, it was a mortuary trail. Chapter 7 Benaras was beautiful in the golden light. The King’s umbrella, under which a Brahman priest sat reciting in the holy language was easily found. He was not pleased to see the widow, ageing in the starkness of the summer heat, dishevelled and without words. The soldier spoke on her behalf, somewhat tersely. What was there to say? The King had spoken, here was the seal. The Brahman obeyed, recited prayers, lit a lamp, called the good boatman and sent the fine linen pouch with the ashes preserved for many years against the hot body of a grieving young woman into the sacred waters. He accepted the coins the woman gave him without thanks or question. She had travelled 500 miles from the Pearl Island by land and sea, not taking a linear route, but stopping in many ports and forest towns. She looked emaciated and yet full of the piety that wrapped her in an inviolable innocence. Many years later, the priest would say of her, “She was a small round woman, of indeterminate age. Although shrunk by fasting and penitence, her clothes which were clean made her seem weightier than she was. Since the King had sent word that she was to be treated well, I found her servants a place to stay, and ensured that she would be safe in our rooms in the courtyard. She spent a whole year in Viswanathswamy temple, and became accepted by all the pilgrims. Then there was a flood, and she left with elephants, cows and servants to return home. I heard that she was a good business women who made much money by the sale of pepper and pearls. Gold coins were harvested by her in exchange of these commodities. More than that I do not know or remember.” In Benaras they found a perfect peace just as they had been promised. The King’s wrath at the lost elephant had been appeased, and he had sent bushels of red rice and green gram by ox cart, enough to last them several years. The widows of Benaras chanted the name of Ram a thousand fold in a practiced synonym with the mourners at the pyre. The sound of crackling pyres accompanied their chanting. They became used to the sight of the priests turning over the charred flesh of corpses, and the smell of clarified butter, and ghee from the pyres of those who could afford it. Interspersed with these routine sights, no longer dreadful was the image of the rising and setting sun on the great river. The years passed swiftly and easily. There was a lot to learn. Sometimes she was mistaken for a whore, as she continued to wear her bright silks, and the diamonds glinted in her nose and ears. No one rebuked her, as they did not know who she was, except that she was accompanied by an elephant, a soldier and a mahout. If a courtesan of the king, here to carry out his wishes, was she available to others too? When lewd men tried to make a deal, she chased them off with bamboo poles. She was a strong woman, round bosomed and though seemingly puny, her thighs were as muscled as those of her guards. She came from a line of martial artists, her maternal grandmother was well versed in Kallari Paattu, the martial arts that all Nairs knew and was submerged in the sambandhan unions of the Brahmins, invisible unless war called them to account for their unstated instincts. There were happy days, yet when her solitude was unbearable, she walked barefoot by the river, her hair untied, her feet dirty, her prayer beads constantly twirling between finger and thumb. People avoided her then, looking curiously at the empty dirty loincloth which still carried the shadow remnants of her husband’s ashes. She had retrieved the cloth from the Dom who had scattered the ashes into the river. If her husband had lived, they would have had children, her parents and his parents would have taught them manners and customs. She felt no bereavement about that – she herself felt incapable of loving. All that she had known of those short years as a child had been snatched from her by the death of her beloved. From there to servitude had been a short jump, hastily conducted by a lack of ritual and the acquiescence of her parents. She had lost the ability to love – no, she was not undemonstrative or uncaring or indifferent. She had understood that others love, that others have emotions, for herself she felt only the need to wander, to run away. The King had given her every protection. Under the guise of a hunter, a warrior, a lover he had spent the best years of his life. But he too, like her, was truly a mendicant and unable to carry out his vocation, he had transferred it to her. She was his other, the one who would carry out his dreams, his wishes, his desires. As they had spent many years with the Toda princess they learned from her the concealment of anguish. She had died, and they had understood in her absence that she held the key to their secret. People always wondered about the King and her, the Brahmin widow who dressed in silks but wore her jewels. Wherever they went, the necessities were laid out for them: the clothes, food, accessories, household things necessary for their daily tasks, They lived simply, using as little as they could of the lentils and rice and spices, safeguarded by the order of the King for them in every town. Sometimes they gave away more than they ate…after twenty years in Kashi, the mahout and the soldier were also wiry and penitent. Their stay in Benaras was only to float the ashes of Amal’s dead husband, but all of them had arrived into an empty space, without thought. The sky was blue and cloudless, the water was clean, the people were friendly. Nothing seemed unusual or strange. It was as if each day was marked by their piety and the constant surveillance by the King. He did not want his seal to be misused or his reputation to be besmirched. The constant queries were by the local people , who wanted to know why a wealthy chief from a foreign country, provided for a widow who fended off enquiries. They were never rude, and there was never any violent rebuttal. They, as pilgrims, were on the path of silence, and the providers of daily victuals would fade away, not receiving answers, but knowing the gift of benediction, a sweet smile of recognition from the widow and her two caretakers. Whatever contempt they actually felt for her they hid, for their loyalty to the King was total. The mahout was busy all day, providing for the elephant and goading him to take walks to the sugarcane fields, where he could eat his fill, and the soldier had errands to carry out on behalf of the King, which involved obeisance to many deities in small and large temples, and devoted repetition of the same, day after day. The soldier carrying the seal on his person worried about its safety every day. They felt that without it, they would be lost, imprisoned, reviled. A common ritual language of piety and memory was not enough. They were able to communicate they were not strangers in the holy land, but people though kind, were always suspicious. Now that their task was completed, why were they not returning to their kingdom? The widow and her attendants had no answer to that. “When God decides” and “When God provides” was their answer each time. They felt embarrassed by their penury for Benaras was full of the estates and guest houses of kings and their sheltering under an umbrella was a statement of the rights of their principality. Amal swore as the years passed that she would ask her King to build steps into the river Kalpathy, to recreate the river in Kashi, on their own land. To that end, they lived in Benaras, eating little, giving much food to widows and accepting alms themselves. The soldier and the mahout were keen to see their families. Twenty years had passed since they had left home, and they had lived for a year or two in every large town on their way to Kashi. It was easy to deal in pepper, receive alms and find hospitality as guests in temple towns. They ate their food, slumbered, spoke little, got communications from their King, through trusted aids and carrier pigeons, and left when fights broke out among the civilians. The harshness of conflict was not for them, as they were dusty mendicants always setting up near a river. Overlordship of local chieftains and local kings they ignored by taking on the mantle of spice traders when need be. To cross forests they bought horses by selling their bony white cows. When they reached a city, the sold te horses and bought fecund milk giving cows. Leading quiet lives, speaking little, and using their wits they had learned many languages, not with pedantry but with a sufficient scattering of phraseology and proverbs. “Why do you want to go back?” the widow asked. “The King has sent word.” “Not to me.” “He put you in my care, and the elephant tusk must be protected.” “The elephant has no tusk.” “True, but he will have. That’s the real reason.” “We will return home when there is a sighting of it.” “Sighting of it…” Vignesh laughed. “ No more time by the Ganga floating ashes of your dead.” “That was done years ago, we are here to collect money to build a temple in honour of Shiva and Parvati.” “Yes, Yes, but the pepper we brought to to sell is gone, the money has been turned into gold, and the alms we received from the kings who mourn their dead are sufficient to build two temples. We cannot wait here any longer. We have many months of journeying and there is danger at every turn.” “We’ll wait till the king sends more soldiers.” “Am I not enough to protect you?” “Yes, yes, but now we are speaking of hefty tribute.” “I’m leaving, the King’s message is sufficient for me.” “Its not so simple. How can I be sure that this is his message?” “My sons are to go to war soon, and my daughters to be married.” “Say that then.” “I’m taking everything with me, so even if you remain her, it will be by your wish. You follow God and I follow the King. He will pay me for my righteousness as I have fulfilled his every wish. I have guarded you, and protected you, and you have benefitted from my constant attention. But my family needs me and the King has permitted me to return . So I will be leaving, taking the money owed to him from our years of begging at the steps of the King for alms. You must keep to your divine interventions, and I must keep my promise to the King.” “Without the King’s seal, I will be another beggar without honour or means of livelihood. I cannot afford to feed the elephant. So we will all travel back together and the money I collected for a temple of our own is my own money. Do not say it belongs to the King, as it becomes his only when I give it to him. He gave you to me as my servant, and by your silence, I know that you agree with what I say. You are here to guard me, and provide me safe passage.” “I obey the King’s will, and he says he wants you to return.” “You told him that I was happy here in the company of mendicants, and no longer grieving for my husband who has entered the world of the ancestors.” “That is true, lady. The King replied that it does not take twenty years to float ashes in a holy river, and you should feed the crows, in your village of Shekharipuram.” My parents are long since gone, and my grandparents became ancestors even before that. I did pray for the Toda princess as you know.” “She needed no prayers for they belonged to another secret tradition and was not assimilated in the royal lineage.” “The King had many wives, but of this he was specially proud that he could marry this young girl. You know that he asked for the Lord’s blessings in Kashi.” “Many think that you took her place in his heart.” “Lies, slander.. no one thought such a thing.” “Your parents were grateful that the King sent you away in your childbearing years.” “ My parents and my husband’s parents treated me as their daughter not as a client of the King. You dishonour my family.” “We were never friends, I did the King’s asking.” ”How can I trust you now that you have imputed something that did not exist between the King and myself.” “I could ask for the accounts which show how much the King spent on your journey to float your husband’s ashes. Why would he have spent so much?.My uncle was the ledger keeper, and so I was trusted with the seal and your body.” “I have no body, my soul resides in Benaras.” “Why would he send and elephant to protect you. One with tusks, and when it ran away, another was promptly sent to safeguard you, though you preferred the water crossing by boat, increasing our journey by many years.” “It was safer as the land route was crossed only by warring soldiers. Yes, the King loved me for the careful way I looked after the Toda princess, and extended her life. He loved me because I was a dutiful child who grew alongside her.” “Two elephants for a widow, and a third when two were lost? The family does have a way of losing elephants in jungles, but then they are hunters.” “ How much does the King spend on war? Two elephants to commemorate the memory of his ancestors in Kashi is nothing. He has spent more on his concubines than he has spent in war. Two elephants to propitiate the memory of his dead wife is a pittance.” “Yes, I went to every temple and read out his prayers every day while we lived here, but its now time to return.” “I’ll ask you no questions, I abide by the King’s will.” Chapter 7 Lakshmi Amal returned to her native land, confident that she would be recived by the King, after her long sojourn in the Northern kingdoms. She carried a Shivalingam identical to the one she had seen in Viswanthswamy temple. She told everyone that she had found it in the flood, along with a bag of gold coins. As they were travelling for many years, afraid of robbers, she had hidden it in the hay that they had bought for their animals, while passing through many towns. They did not take the sea route, but with the giddy young elephant who frightened off the curious with his trumpeting cries, they went over hills, plains, mountains, forests, rivers, into the Deccan with its hlack soil where they stopped to rest for some years. Wars were raging, it was 1423 by the Pepper Traders calendars, and the madness of lust for death pursed them . It was not known how many men had lost their lives across the border of Golconda and Hampi – rivers ran with blood, but the old widow, the mahout and the soldiers knew only one thing, that they were on the winning side. Lakshmi Amal knew she was a figment of the imagination. People knew of her, they knew every last detail of her life, and the final signature that legitimized her was that the King owed her a favour for keeping his lovely Toda wife safe while he was away at war. It was all so long ago, and her youth was barely a memory now. His debt had been paid. It was known that she had safe passage across kingdoms and ports where ever the copper plates were legitimate. He had given her his royal seal, and with that was her anchor, a commitment that she won both prestige as well as perfect security her and her men. Thampan, the Mahout was very upset when he was given marching orders by Vignesh. The monsoon was just over, the roads were slushy, and there was no dry hay to be had. What was he supposed to feed the elephant when they left the sugar cane field? “God will provide!” Lakshmi Amal said loftily. Thampan wanted to prod her with his javelin. He turned his face away. “I would have stayed longer in Benaras if the King had permitted,” he muttered. “I love the city as much as you do, but our orders are to make the journey back. The King will provide for all of us. Has the King ever left us in doubt?” Amal replied. Vignesh said, “Why do you bother explain to Thmpan, His job is to follow me. I am going ahead, and you must keep my pace.” “I will pack my belongs few as they are and I’ll ride the elephant,” Amal said. “How will you do that?” She laughed, looked at them, made the young elephant kneel. Then, she was quickly tying the ends of her shawl in such a way that her long brown legs were exposed to them as she clambered up skillfully. “When did you learn to do that?” Vignesh asked fearfully. He had never seen such a sight. The elephant was docile so she easily climbed up its bristly leg and up its island like back. The mahout had placed the sedan and the thick quilted cloth earlier that day. He understood perfectly that he was now in charge of the cows and provisions. Thamban was astute to the way of the world. No one could ask questions of the woman who had the King’s favour. He thought to himself that twenty years have passed since we left, and five more vagrant years will be our lot as we return home. There is only the way forward, with the King’s runners telling us what we must do and how we must behave, and who we must talk to. The woman though far away from the King is his consort in lieu of the dead wife. He has made her his own by magical rites, “Follow the path, be with her, communicate rapidly if she takes on a lover.” Those were the rules Vignesh and I were given. The King and she are sibling souls, they understand one another, she has no difficulty following his orders and he permits her the feedom that women do not ordinarily have. She was definitely intimate with the King, though they had not seen one another. How did they communicate? Through messengers ofcourse! He had seen letters being delivered to her, and she too had traveled this vast distance with palm leaf and stylus. He knew that she lay awake at nigh, reading and writing, that often she wandered out with fruit for the elephant, and spoke to it tenderly. He did not think it unusual. Strange, maybe, but if one travelled with a soldier who carried the King’s seal, then it was understood they were important. This elephant barely 3 metres tall was for show, a dwarf elephant, always calling him baby elephant. They dressed him up every morning with canopy or umbrella and soft cloths sewn together to form a nice cushion. People gave them money, and farmers allowed them entry in their fields for the pleasure of standing near the elephant. There was nothing to fear, as the loud trumpeting of the elephant was sufficient to frighten robbers and scoundrels away. When they left Benaras, Lakshmi Amal wept a lot, and could not be comforted. It was as if they were being separated from a body part, and their bodies would never be whole again. “We can never return” Vignesh said softly. Amal was dressed in her best silks, though not wearing jewels, as she had put them in the pouch she carried with gold coins received in alms. Up on the elephant no one could reach her. The elephant did not jostle her, and seemed to know the way back. Although there was the soldier ahead and the mahout behind, he really seemed to know the way home. There was never any problem for food or water, they were well provided. Word of their arrival reached their lodgings weeks earlier, and there they would stay for weeks or months, till the seasons made it possible for them to move onward. It was the great flood after they had left Benaras that brought them the greatest gift of their lives. It was a small shivalingam. “The Gods have spoken,”Amal said with utmost joy. “Its not ours, should we return and give it back to the temple?” Vignesh said nervously. Which temple?” Amal asked with irritation. “There are so many in Kashi. How do we know which one flew out with the sacred waters.” Vignesh spoke again, “It looks like the one from the Viswanathswamy temple.” “That’s not possible,” Amal was terse. “You know how carefully they guard it. They never allow it out of their sight.” “There are four of them in different sanctuaries.” “Yes, Yes, if this is one of them, they will just replicate it. They have stone smiths; they can reduplicate this precious lingam.” “The King will not allow a stolen shivalingam to enter his kingdom.” “It’s not stolen.” “It does not belong to us.” “The river brought it for us. Gangadevi knows who her true believers are.” “We can all be true believers, but we cannot take temple property or touch it.” Amal said nothing. She whispered in the elepahant’s flapping ears. He was only too happy to obey her, and pulled the shivalingam out from the river sludge. The elephant washed it in the river, and then triumphantly placed it in an expensive shawl that Amal put out for him. “Untouched by hand,” Amal said triumphantly. Her round face was missing the vermillion that she had worn for no reason other than for confirming her identity as ‘a widow who was not a widow for her husband lived in her heart’, and the Toda queen had long ago permitted this indulgence. Vignesh sent a message to the King, who replied to his “friend” Amal. “Bring the shivalingam to me. Do not return to Benaras. I will build a temple for your lingam. You have now transcended womanhood.” She was pleased with his answer, and had her head shorn of hair. Vignesh saw that she had become more independent of her status, not because of her persona as a mendicant, but because she was the owner of a lingam which she had found and was taking as a tribute to the King. The Mahout was, unlike Vignesh, a stubborn idiosyncratic man. Many years ago, he thought he had been downgraded by having a baby elephant to look after, as even the weight of the carriage was too much, and now, with difficulty it took on the woman and the shivalingam. Tiny though the lingam was, compared to the weight of the one the King had dredged from the river so many generations ago, each one persuaded that he was the genitor of that vision, it had immense value. The woman with her shorn head was a liability too. He had to hold her hand every time she got down from the elephant. With her tonsured head gleaming in the dusk, she looked young and vulnerable. As she was on the path of silence, he rarely heard her voice, and could never remember its cadence in passing thoughts. Was she young or old? They had been in Benaras for twenty years, and the seasons had passed swiftly. The King had left them well supplied with the visits of known merchants and well wishers. They had never known any want, any sorrow other than what they had carried with them as baggage. It had taken them many years to reach Benaras, but they were now beginning the slow journey back. It would take less time, as the monsoons were behind them, they were not taking the sea route because the baby elephant was there for show, not for celebration. There would not be any stop or stay at various harbours, only the tedious plodding through a long Winter and Spring season. The mahout had an ass to ride on, while the lady travelled on the elephant, and Vignesh managed the valuable bullock cart, as the ponies had been sold in Benaras for a large sum of money. The lingam was ornamented with flowers during the day, and hot embers of incense danced in the shadows of the early morning. Their bathing and ablutions were completed in the dark, food was cooked at dawn and dusk (always the same red rice and green gram, ‘kanji and payr’). The simplicity of their routines sustained them through the dust and drab coldness of a Northern winter. They fed the elephant as well as they could and since he was never chained, he was good tempered and obedient, his bright eyes twinkling as he drank up the warm rice water and was hand fed jiggery. The mahout was quick to use the javelin when his ward looked to wander. Sometimes in the cold of the morning, the elephant would drop on the ground, and refuse to move. Then the lady would whisper in his ears, and he would whisk his tail at her, and with his trunk extended, invite her to climb on his back. The mahout would settle the carriage and heave the widow up, grumbling at the pollution he had incurred. She was an old woman it was true, having seen 45 summers, but the labour of heaving her up required two men, so Vignesh devised a chair and holding the legs of the sedan, the task became that much easier, and less contentious. In any case for them, as servants of the King, whether they carried dead bodies or a woman on their shoulder was immaterial, they did what they were told. Amal carried the lingam on her back wrapped in bark of sandalwood and expensive silk. It was hidden from robbers and the gaze of the covetous. If someone accused her of it being stolen, she took out the parchment that showed it was the property of the Cheras, her King being a dependent war lord. This matter of hierarchy and chieftainship was beyond the mahout’s comprehension. When they returned home, it would not be Aychen, often called Udaya who met them, but quite another, his nephew from the extended family of 9 Lords. It was not for them to weep at the death of one Varma or another. Rule and duties were delegated. Life went on. In any case the King had commanded the servers not to inform the widow of the King’s death, and the natural succession that followed. The widow was arriving with silver coins as tribute, gold coins as gifts, along and inexplicable fortunes received for her commendable work in maintaining the suzerainity of the Kalpathy rajas, were all to be dedicated to the current raja who had supported them invisibly these many ears. They wept for the loss of their patron and protector, but life must end in death, this is the law of nature. The soldier and the mahout let the old widow believe that they were petitioners for the rights of their King and he was immortal. Thamban, of the twisted face, governed his emotions as best as he could as his rage had made him palsied in his youth. Since he spoke to no one, and no one spoke to him, his vocabulary was limited to guttural calls to the elephant, and bird like cries to the widow, when he wanted food or help. She was always considerate to him, as he was her servant, and she pitied his condition. He was always on call, to protect her, carry her when she was tired, haul her upto the carriage – so many acts of intimacy that made her deferential and him arrogant. He got confused sometimes and treated her as if she was a rare object. She accepted the pendulum of his emotions: sometimes she was a sack of coal, at other times he was as protective to her as if she was an infant. She had asked him many questions, and he had answered as best as he could, with signs, wild gestures, and petitioning glances to Vignesh. “Where is your village? He gestured that it was far away. “Are you married?” He nodded, smiling pleasantly. “How many children?” Five, showing his fingers. “How old are they?” He gestured by height, size and number. “How many girls? “Two”, he said plaiting his daughters’ hair in ostentatious mimicry. “And their mother?” “Dead” “Who looks after them?” “Grandparents” Thamban mouthed in reply, imitating the walk of ancients. They would be so different now, the widow thought. Unrecognizable. Would they remember their father? Yet, they would have learned to protect his fields and the King would reward him well. The Varma who had protected them for so many years was a nephew of Udayan. He was a tall lean man, dark skinned with a shock of curly hair, who looked like his mother, the aunt of the King who had died.. He had been a robber baron who had ridden from Kallar country, a poet and horseman. She cried, though now dry of tears, thinking of his love for the Toda princess. People often gave her odd enquiring looks, because they thought she was the King’s intimate friend. He was dead, rumors had reached her ;she missed him, but she was somehow, inviolable, nothing could hurt her. What she carried back was so precious that the King’s seal was sufficient to her. For twenty years she had received royal letters and privileges believing he was alive. Her life had always been lived at a tanget, she was never harmed or brutalised except by the ever present shadow of Death. Even as a stranger in Benaras, she was protected by her virtue – she had nothing to lose. Widows were stigmatized, but she was not, it was truly a mystery though living a lie had come easily to her, and virtue a natural instinct to survive with the help of a patron. She thought of her parent and grand parents, the Toda Princess and her husband, the King. She was always lost in thought, transcending the discomfort of journeys and public scrutiny. As she had not cast aside her nose stud, her vermillion marking on the brow, and the jewels on her wrist including the golden arm band, no one had thought of her as a widow or treated her as one. It was a crime to impersonate normal women, but what choice did she have as an antarjyati risking public attention? “My marriage was not consummated so how am I a widow?” she had said in her youth. And thus she had survived the travails of her situation, first locked up in the castle with the Toda princess, then with her attendants who treated her with candied sugary deference as they thought her to be the King’s mistress, then in the many cities where they lived in comfort where the ownership of the King’s golden seal was sufficient to bring her renown. The ascendance of the new King, and the acquisition of the lingam by him changed things ofcourse. Since her menstrual flow had ceased, there was less to worry.. The rules of pollution were beyond her comprehension. “Don’t we sit with our feet next to our banana leaf when we eat?” she had asked the priests when she was a child, and they had laughed. She was a creature who lived by instinct, dependent on the kindness of Kings. Their patronage had been essential to her. The magician whom she had met in her youth had taught her the arts of sorcery “to defeat the devil by learning his tricks.” For herself, she made no distinction between God and Devil, as her servants all used sorcery and astrology too and were adepts. Poetry was their craft, learned women who were respected for their charm. They kept others at bay with their disguises, but now with the new Lord, they would have to learn new ways. It was said of him that he was valiant, true, and yet displayed his skill through rote. With the old Lord who had died before their return, there was an intimacy, a familiarity. Sometimes other women in the court sized her up as she went through her duties. She was used to those sideway glances, enquiring looks which were directed to her and the other serving women. They were there because the King had decreed that they were necessary for the sustenance of his wife. Yet, since he was never separated from her unless the drums of war demanded, or the trumpets of governance called, she had known him almost as intimately from a veiled distance. She thought of him often, the way his breathing was punctuated by sudden stops of breath, and the way he flung his arm over his wife’s throat, almost choking her. She would stop fanning the Princess, and remove the heavy arm from her delicate throat. As servants, nothing was expected from them but their invisibility. Now that man was dead, her patron, her wiell wisher, her Lord. Long live the King. The new one, angular, young and gauche, used the same seal, made the same provision for them as his mother’s brother, and used the same amanuensis for twenty years. He sent her letters of affectionate regard, and pretended to her, that he was his uncle. When he occupied the palace and the pilgrims had returned, he chose to remind the old widow, that they had met when he was a small boy. She remembered him vaguely - the broad forehead, the large bulging eyes, the Kallar ferocity though he was not yet in his teens. He said in his missives penned in ink on palm leaves stapled together that he had already built a temple for the lingam as he was waiting for her return anxiously. He asked her to count the money that she was bringing as tribute from pilgrims who visited his priests for their mortuary rites. He asked for fine Chinese silk for his consort. There was no end to his requests. She piled them carefully in a wooden box so that she had evidence as they travelled, that she indeed had a patron. Not that they were assaulted by robbers, or that she was mistaken for a prostitute. Now that she wore the white draperies of an austere mendicant and her head was shaved, there was not even a second look at her. People were used to the sight of wandering ascetics, and while women usually were hidden away in their sedans, the old widow was on an elephant with two soldiers as escorts. No one dared to look at her, or meet her fiery gaze. What she carried with her was hidden under expensive cloths, and the fly whisk of white yak tail was sufficient to keep away amorous or covetous gazes. Chapter 8 The elephant did not have a hasty gait. Like all things young, it was playful and enquiring. Children ran to pet it and feed it bananas and sugar cane. But the pilgrims returning home were in a hurry, and did not encourage friendliness. Word had got to them that all of Benaras was looking for the lingam which had been lost in the flood. There were hundreds of lingams of similar age and size, all sunk in the sludge, and yet the priests would not accept them, saying that wherever it turned up it would be installed as the linga for Viswanthaswamy. Ancient priests keeping ledgers knew that from generation to generation there would be those who recognized the power of the lingam wherever it was. At night the soldiers and the old widow put up their tents under the sky, laden with stars. There was nothing to veil the brilliance of comets or the moon, sodden with light. When they reached the forests of Wayanad they came to Pulpally and the Sitadevi temple. The floods had come, leaving devastation in its wake, but the potters, tile makers and the quila (fort) keepers had arrived, and the temple was over run with masons and threshers. Food was plenty, it was now the harvest season. They left the elephant there, as it was beginning to show signs of restlessness, and the mahout said it was in ‘mast’ and rebellious. They had no idea what to do, and thought it was because Thampan, now calling himself Arumugam, was from a village close by. The elephant remained small in size, though now 25 years old and more, and the tusks had been encased at the ends with silver knobs, indented with the King’s seal it was mature and ready to mate. They remonstrated with Thampan, but his concave face, with its blunt nose became increasingly vituperative and spit began to fleck the sides of his mouth. He said nothing, his guttural echoing speech creating shivers in both Lakshmi Amal and Vignesh’s spine…together they felt ants were crawling in their brain, and they felt fear, horror, disgust. It was best to turn away, and tell the King that this elephant too had run away. Vignesh said they only had to wait and the King would send battalions to carry back the sacred lingam. They had no cause to hide it any longer, they were back in familiar territory, the principalities of their chiefs. Thampan’s disappearance with the baby elephant was a cause of great embarrassment to Vignesh, as was the news officially received that all the letters, messages and appearances of couriers was from the King’s nephew Aditya. Those loving attentive notes had not carried a name, and Amal had presumed that they were the servants of Udaya, though she had heard that he had died, she had not believed it. Names meant nothing to the servers, one KIng died, another came. But the conquering hero had solved their problems never letting them know for sure that the one they had served had died. So it had always remained a rumour. They knew, but they didn’t know for sure as they were so far from home. The widow was after all an inconsequential node in the story. Even the St Thomas Christian magician had prophecied to her, one day, traders from a far off land will reduce you to legend, and pass you off as a strange wanderer to pronounce you aberrant but successful, born under the sign of Poovarsha, and good for the claimants of alms to know. What did it mean? The umbrella had to be served, the tribute brought to the King, the ledger maintained, the new members of the Achen clan entered into the Brahmins’ safe keeping in Kashi. That work had been his and he had completed it with honour. That they had not been met with misfortune on their jorney to Benaras was because Feroz Tuglaq had been ruler, and he was loved and order was maintained. The kingdoms of the North and South were a fragile economy, and all passage way granted to those who had the copper plates of authority, and the seal of the King, reigning in any principality. Ofcourse the plam leaf missives exchanged between the widow and the seemingly widower King were now null and void. He would have to destroy them in case word circulated among the people that Udaya’s nature had been forged and appropriated in the letters dictated by the amanuensis on the orders of the King. It had it seemed to him one function, which was to keep the widow safe. For twenty years she had believed the King loved her in a pristine way, as a youth might love his mother’s friend. Her strength had come from this intense feeling of a mutual reciprocity, born of gratitude and friendship. The King had loved his Toda wife without measure, and the old widow had received a seeming avalanche of love from the King, because he knew that without her, the Toda princess would have died earlier. In 1388 when the pilgrims had set out for Kashi, they had thought it was the beginning of the unthinkable, a journey of romance and the intellect. They had charted maps, become friendly with the strangers they had no hope of ever meeting again. They had lived together wihout bringing scandal or shame to their families, who had soon got on with their lives. Now with Thampan refusing to complete the journey, saying he had not received wages for 25 years, and asserting that the baby elephant was his. He would serve the village temple, and the elephant would have a home. Its tusks were worth much. And Thampan would be the heir. When Vignesh informed Aditya, Achen said nonchalantly, “Boil him in oil, I am Shaktan Thampuran. The Christian magician has told me that one day such a one will come who will win wars and throw out those not following his wishes.” Their only recourse was to complete the journey, and they took the water roure secretly at night. Forty three rivers went to the sea, and they used the known maps of the tributaries of the Neela and the Pamba, arriving laterally and safely to Achen’s place. There, the lingam was dutifully given to the King, who in turn presented it to the Brahmins whom his uncle had invited to serve his kingdom. The King received more money as tribute from his priests in Kashi than he had anticipated, and called the widow to his chambers. She stood there, whimpering with grief, lost in her memories of her love for the Toda princess and her royal husband. The King had survived only five years in her company and those were interspersed by war. “What is love that you should carry it in your heart, so many seasons after their death?” Aditya asked the old widow. “It was his love for her that made my life have any meaning. That he died so soon after her was not known to us. We thought that we would make him rich by our sacrifices. He was our Lord, and we wanted to bring the wealth of Benaras to him as was his due.” “To think of Kashi is to receive liberation.” “Possessing wealth, another’s wealth did not make us rich.” “You safeguarded his tribute due to the Chola empire. I too am an old man, and will surely carry the memory forward. The Rajas were our patrons and we were never made to feel lesser than them, inspite of their great riches.” “I would have come much sooner, if I had know Uday had died. He gave me permission to float my husband’s ashes in the Ganga in Benaras.” “You have brought the Ganga to us, we are grateful!” “Then build a temple for the Shivalingam in Kalpathy!” “Kallu Patti, the stone grandmother, Parvati the sacred mother.” “Kai Patti – it was the divine hand of the mother that Uday saw, and then he found the great lingam, which became the source of the strength of the temple.” “ I will institute your lingam, and create a Benaras for you. People need not walk so far. Ofcourse, I will have rights over the income for maintenance and ritual year round. It is after all, as you said, our family sanctuary.” “Your kingdom has been blessed by a long reign and many wonders. The King owns the temple, we are merely devotees.” “Let the people bring their dead to the river here, and I shall proclaim your valour in stone.” Lakshmi Amal looked to Aditya in gratitude. Their names had collapsed into one another, and others would repeat them with respectful intonation. She had never known that the transition had occurred so many years ago. The King’s golden seal in their possession had been sufficient to chronicle the passage of time. This great favour of patronage and the great kindliness had passed from his amanuensis by order of the great Ammachi and Achu. The Toda princess had conveyed her grace onwards to future generations. Lakshmi Amal returned to Shekharipuram having returned the seal and the letters exchanged between them, to the King. “It makes a good story”, the King said, throwing their letters in to the fire. “There will be no evidence of my part, in the favour extended to you by virtue of your service to the Princess. She was not one of us. The King loved her and used your people to get her entry into the castle. “Let it be”, we said, as his sambandham had anyway, already been completed long ago. We didn’t care whom he loved or bedded, but he was one who gave his heart to an outsider. We felt sorry for her, what could she know of our ways? And after she died of the hot air and the rich foods of the plains, he could not hide his agony, but went barefoot and ragged, walking all over his kingdom. People did not recognize him, as learned in the Vedas, and an expert in the art of war and verse, he was merely a clansman of the King, disguised as a vagrant. And then he disappeared wearing his armour into yet another war, and hearing of his heroism in battle, his death was foretold. I was a young man by then, and remembering that two shepherd soldiers had been harnessed to a widow, so that she may return with the alms and tributes owing to us, I did not send news of his death to her. Her misfortune was in abeyance during the pilgrimage, and good luck followed her in her pious task of floating her husband’s ashes in the holy river in Kashi. What need would she have of more bad news. The loss of elephants (some say two, and others say three) were not her fault, but that of the mahouts. So I hid from her the news of the King’s death. We too believe that kinship is divine and the King never dies. So I had the amanuensis write those letters on my behalf/ his behalf. As the last Chola king, I was interested in defending our boundaries, extending my empire, fated as we were to be swallowed up by Vijayanagara. Yet between the rule of the slave kings, before the widows journey commenced, and the arrival of Feroz Bin Tuglak who took upon himself the planting of trees, and the making of guest houses, lay Gingee. The widow returned to my kingdom through a landscape known too well by us, bloodied by war, but curiously innocent of lust or greed or venom, or so we would like others to believe. Some are like that, rendered transparent by their asceticism. Her long journey home had rid her of all weight. Of course I remembered her when she left on her pilgrimage, her scavenger’s bag of a dead man’s bones against her rounded hips. I thought of her as Sita’s pet vulture, a condor with an ashen head, whirling in the Northern skies, never flinching from the sun or the desert sand of the North. And here she was, returned to us like a delicate swan, untouched by volence, or greed, ever protective of my armed soldier Vignesh, whose hair had grown grey, guarding the tribute and the chance legacy of the floods in Kashi: a shivalingam, as if we didn’t have enough of those. Vignesh had placed a silver seshadri (protective serpent head associated with Vishnu and the holy mountain) over it, and had made it ever more precious and sacred. Of course he knew Uday had died and Aditya was King but he was told not to inform the old widow, whose name we never took on principle. She was virgin and widow, a philosophical contradiction. And by my uncle’s kindness to her had been marked by an auspiciousness around which legends grew. We never took her name, because we didn’t want our kinswomen to wear their jewels and walk to Benaras. It is a habit that few can afford. Because Kingship is a sodier’s right, we, Uday and I , could give her the protection she needed. And she was grateful. Her letters gave me an understanding of the world, and many different species of birds, animals, fish, humans – so respectfully did she write. All her village was devoted to us, and my long reign was the result of their love and patriotism. After she brought the shivalingam to us, my simple duty was to house it, and accept the remuneration that the priests routinely sent us from Kashi. We housed them, protected them , and its true, we did not have a palace there to house our guests. The Shekharipuram kings were never very wealthy, riding on the backs of the Chola, Kochi Kings, and Samuthrans, and the blessed memory of the Cheras. We had our sense of valour and duty offering our services to those who most need them . Warriorhood was so repetitive and our duties so malleable (if we survived them) that we named our sons Komban after the lost elephants we sometimes retrieved from those who stole them or passed them off as their own. So whether I was Uday or Aditya or Marantanda, or Ravi, hardly mattered to our subjects, as Komban Achen sufficed for each uncle and nephew who had the right to rule, and we married into royal families so that our children would have proprietorship of their mothers lands. Its true that Lakshammal was horrified on arrival on seeing me, but she hid her despair as quickly as she could. Politeness demanded that she ask no questions and accept me as her sovereign. It was I who had to put her at ease, as clearly, she was acting as if she was twice widowed ( if such a thing were possible in their esteemed community). My Konganad blood was getting clotted at the sight of her tears, her bedraggled appearance, her loss of the ecstatic expression with which she brought the precious shivalingam. That sacred object which she had brought with such care was small in comparison to the weight of the lingam that my ancestor, Shubhangi’s son had dredged from the river. This one was small and delicately fashioned for truth to tell, its ability to transform people’s vision was such that the fame of our temple went vey far. We had the papers ofcourse, so no one could claim the temple’s revenue for personal gain or community gain. We alone were the keepers of the faith, with jurisdiction over temple priests and care takers, and all the precious sacred objects were accounted for in our ledgers. My duty was to safeguard the old widow’s gift to us, so I had no reason to enquire from her, why she wept so much, or why her shorn head was suddenly like a translucent pearl, all the blood having been siphoned to her face and neck. Did my presence shock her so much? “Why do you cry, dear Lady?” “I have no reason.” “Yet, you see my face and you weep. Is it my ferocious gaze?” “When I left 25 years ago, you were a small large eyed boy, eve present in the court.” “It is my beard, then!” “No, my Lord. I did not expect that my master was dead.” “I am your Master.” “I accept you as so.” “Do you fear me?” “No, my Lord!” “Then you should.” “You repeat yourself.” “How did my mistress die?” “You were here then.” “Of heartbreak.” “So also my mother’s brother, of the same cause.” “So after I left with the permission from Ammachi, he died?” “Yes.” “And no one told me?” “Your tears are enough to fill a lotus pond, though you have heard the news so late.” “No one told me.” “What could you have done? My amanuensis continued to write letters on his behalf.” “He was dead.’ “His ghost spoke through me.” “I was writing to him.” “We do worship our ancestors. My uncle was my dearest friend, and most loving companion. He had no children with his slave wife whom he had robbed from her people.” “She was no slave.” “Not to the slave who served her, but to us she was just that.” “He loved her.” “And so he died.” “It is as if you took his words from his heart, and wrote them out for me.” “I did. I wanted you to live.” Amal stared aghast, her large eyes no longer under lined with kohl, did not blink. “You lied to me for 25 years!” “I thought you were precious and your love for your husband was visible to us all. Your gratitude to my mother’s brother was evident to us. As I had seen you from my early youth, I understood you. I thought you would die if your patron stopped writing to you. So I took on that role. We all felt it was better that you continued your important work. And look, you have brought home this powerful lingam from the very source itself. I will establish an alcove in our family temple in Kalpathy, and people will have all the arts to view when they visit. Do not disappoint me. Give me the honour of continuing the work the King asked you to do so many years ago. You have been a faithful subject. Your letters gave me news of the many kingdoms you passed through. You described how you were treated. Marthanda would have been pleased, all of us are named Marthanda or Komaban. You know that nothing personal could be written by the King. Yes, you told me everything about yourself, and notated daily, the roster of expenses. You never enquired about my feelings, nor could you, it was not your place to do so. As for the lost elephants I could not go in search of them, as my uncle left me so many duties and obligations, and I had to maintain peace in our kingdom, while waging war on behalf of other more powerful kings. How could I say, “I am not that Martanda, not that Komban”. The enormity of camouflage was evident to them both – how could they hide their tears and laughter? He clasped her close to his chest and she thought this intimacy his against nature, but then he wiped her tears, called her ‘mother” . tenderly took the Shivalingam away from her. “Its ours”, he said “and your name will never be forgotten. You have returned the gold seal that belongs to us and took you safely across many lands. By delivering this lingam, and the tribute from our constituencies in foreign lands, you have proved your loyalty as our subject.” She bowed her head and walked all the way back to Shekharipurm in the dusk, where she became known not just was the woman who floated her husband’s ashes in the Ganga, but also one who had the King inscribe a pillar in her name in gratitude. She wondered at the enormity of it all, at the way in which fate had preserved and protected her. The King owned the temple, and the lingam, and the revenue that came from it. He visited every morning, and flung himself in prostration before it. He lit the lamp, and said his prayers, starting the day in all its holiness, the sun rising. He completed his purificatory ablutions. He had heard that the woman who had carried it to Kalpathy was a famous temple artist, but in time, as his reign was long and he had to consolidate the loot of war, he forgot about her. He never went to Shekharipuram to seek her, or to give her money, and she never sent word to him about her poverty as she was content with the rice and pumpkins and lentils that the temple priests cooked and gave her. Why weep while the paintbrush was still wet, and the faces of the Gods and Goddesses smiled back. Susan Visvanathan, 14th May 2025, Aleppey. We who were hidden away, we did not complain. It was our karma, we were told repeatedly. We were children, we obeyed our parents. We hoped there would be surcease of pain, but there was not. We were guided through the mourning rituals and not excluded from the family. Manu was a feared name, but not every family followed instructions as the priests demanded. Our famly was pretty low in the hierarchy anyway – imported mortuary priests, speaking Tulu or Tamil, depending on whether we had walked from the Konkan or Tanjavur. The traders often spoke to us in either language, dependent on us for mortuary rituals. They woule lovingly bring the dead body from far off places cyring and weeping, and beating their chests. After the cremation was over in a bear by wood, the ashes were floated in the holy river Kalpathy with cries of Shiva and Rama as we followed both, and were free to do so.

Missionaries, Administrators and Planters: The Dynamic of British Colonialism In Kavita Philip’s catalytic analyses of the interlocking of development and modernity, she focuses on the triumvirate of colonial administrators, missionaries and planters. Her aim is primarily to show that the guilt feelings of post colonial studies needs to be re-examined. Toward this end, she uses technology and science as an index to understand commerce and capitalism in the 19th century. Importantly, the significance of objectivity in social science lies for her in the courage to take on the past in a way that makes contemporary events more comprehensible. By looking at the dilemmas and questions of colonialism in relation to the elites of both Britain and India, she wishes analytical entry in to the ‘whited sepulchres’ of history. This curiosity is part of the way in which riddles are first posed, then answered. Getting past the friendliness quotient, and the tacit assumptions of how elites hold hands in the pursuit of wealth and status, becomes the primary indication of how reading the archives and secondary texts gives us the motives for aggrandizement and expansion (Philip 2003). Her book is an interesting guide post into the question of how lower caste communities were socialized into industrial work force through the missionizing movements of the London Missionary Society and the Basil Mission. The motif was as much to do with crafts such as the handloom and masonry industry, as it was to do with the preparation for an industrial work force. Evangelising movements such as Hindutva have long been known to do the same, using many of the principles of colonial Christian mission to organize working class movements into a religious framework conducive to a one nation, one religion format which the colonial authorities were well known for (Visvanathan 2000, 2007) Similarly Poornima Paidapati argues that it was militarization that produced the initial categorization of local communities as “primitive” demanding tribute from them as part of the imperial project. She communicates very emphatically that colonial and nationalist anthropology played a part in projecting through its concepts a fashioned and refashioned world view appropriated for development projects, braiding together the disciplines of military technology, anthropology and race science (Paidapati 2010: 13)). Her argument is that imperialism depended on the soldier- explorer- administrator who took on the task of reordering borders with the help of modern communication systems in a world where globalization required the framing of boundaries (ibid 25). Thus military officers of the colonial army were more genteel than the acquisitive traders and military scientists, and the former presented themselves as gentlemen invested in knowledge or as anthropological writers (31). Ofcourse, in Queen Victoria’s time, the combined role of providing order in a hierarchical colonial construction brought in the missionary as well (Visvanathan 2000). John Sullivan is one of the interesting characters that colonial historiography throws up among many. He is associated with the cultivation of potatoes in the hills (Visvanathan 2022) and a gregarious character who had many friends in colonial Shimla whom he hosted at generous hunting parties. Records of his dealings begin in the 1820s in the Nilgiris, and he is the subject of much curiosity. Frederick Price in his report of 1908 to Lord Ampthill, Governor of Madras, spends much time laboring over his account of the time when John Sullivan was in the Nilgiris.. The book “Ootacamund: A History” begins with an enquiry about medieval times, after the Synod of Udeyamperoor in 1599, whether the Toda were ancient dispersed Syrian Christians. Search parties were sent out through difficult terrain in 1602 but the information brought back was not ‘desirable’. Another search party was sent out, in 1603 by the Portuguese, but returned with a lot of information but no evidence of Christian belief among the Toda (Price 2012: 2). Sullivan is thought to have accompanied Whish and Kindersley in 1819 on the 2nd of January, considered to be a second tour of the Nilgiris by those British Collectors. The description of the products to be found were wheat, barley, peas, opium, garlic, mustard, and various species of millet, pointing as Price says, to the presence of the Badagas who were a cattle keeping community who practiced shifting cultivation in the Nilgiris (ibid 15). In May 1819, Mr Sullivan visited the Nilgiris again in the company of M. Leschenault, and the letters of this explorer are translated from French to English, providing details of climate, inhabitants and production by Rev. Hough in 1829 ( ibid 16). By the end of 1823, Sullivan was able to live in the house which he had constructed in Badaga country as it was near completion (ibid 17). According to the German missionary Metz, it was the Collector of Coimbatore, John Sullivan who had discovered Ootacamund. A friendly Badaga had invited him, seeing how much the Collector suffered in the heat, saying that, ‘It is so cold there the water becomes transformed into glass’ (ibid 18). Stonehouse, Sullivan’s home, was the first of many hundreds of houses that turned Ootacamund into a government sanitorium. For this to happen there had to be large swamps which were drained, and many forests cut down, which affected the streams. The visits that John Sullivan made in 1819 were kept a secret, or not made at all depending on one’s view of the reporting of it, which was nil. However, there are two orders, giving metreological information, dated 8th and 16th April 1822, which are attributed to John Sullivan. Letters signed by him go out from the Nilgiris in the month of May 1822. A professional gardener had been imported by him in late 1821, or early 1822 and was thought to be an overseer on behalf of John Sullivan. Kavita Philips quotes from a commentator Molly Panter Downes, “Gardening was a passion with Mr Sullivan. He sent for a gardener from England, a Mr Johnson, who was left in charge of building operations when the Collector had to tear himself reluctantly away to attend to the affairs of his district. With Johnson, in 1821, arrived the first English apple and peach trees and strawberries, the first seeds of flowers and vegetables. ...Potatoes were introduced and flourished. … A few years after Mr Sullivan’s arrival, gargantuan wonders were being compared as proudly as though their owners were competing in a village show at home. A beet is recorded as being nearly three feet round, a radish three feet long, and a cabbage plant eight feet high. Geraniums grew in hedges, and somebody’s verbena forgot its place and shot up to the sky in a trunk like that of a robust tree. English oaks and firs were planted…. in 1829 there were wild white strawberries, wild Ayrshire roses, and small, deep damask roses growing in Ooty. A convalescent young officer described Ooty as ‘presenting to the eye a wildered paradise’ (cited in Philip 2003: 44). It was during this time he was building his cottage Stonehouse, and applying for a lease on the land, which was the custom before occupying land. In 1835, he records being conversant with the custom of the Todas, and paying them for property which he occupied (Price 2012:20). On 5th July 1820, he is recorded as having visited the Nilgiris again, perhaps in the company of his wife and other members of the party, but where it is not stated. Price considers it impossible that they could have gone further than Dimhatti as it was the monsoon. The first visit that Sullivan made to Ootacamund is in 1821, and as his hut was built on the site of a single Toda hut, which the Badagas called Whottakamund or the single Toda house. This is offered as the origin of the name Ootacamund. (ibid 32). The Badaga guide having taken him there in April 1822, he started building his cottage, and left it in the care of his English gardener. By the 1830s administration was acting upon the widespread usurpation of lands in the Nilgiris by settlers, so John Sullivan produced a note saying that he had paid 100 rupees to the Todas on the area taken by him, at the rate of one rupee per acre. By 22nd May 1823, Stonehouse was sufficiently habitable for Mrs Sullivan to visit and stay. The first baptism of Ootacamund was of their son, recorded on that day, at Stonehouse. The child was born in February, as the Sullivans were at Coimbatore all of that month. Almost all of 1823 and 1824 were spent in Ootacamund, including the winter months, finishing Stonehouse, and establishing the lake (ibid 34).The source of stones for the building of the house was not established, but they still existed in the first decade of the 20th century and were incorporated into government offices. Copying the Sullivans, all of the Europeans in the government in the Coimbatore district built themselves houses too. They were given the directive that they should observe hierarchy of status and build lower than the Collector (ibid 35). In 1827, Sullivan rented his house to Government for Rs 490 a month, and it was converted into a sanatorium for sick officers. This arrangement continued till 1834 when it was returned, as the lease to government had expired. Sullivan may have used it sporadically till his retirement in 1841, for the rest of the time it was rented out. It was sold sequentially to various purchasers, and in 1858 it was opened as a school by the bishop of Madras. In March 1859, it was sold to the Lawrence asylum, and the school reopened at Lovedale (ibid 37). By 1875, Stonehouse became the site of government meetings though ‘ no native clerks were taken up’ (ibid 38). The house was renovated to accommodate married clerks at the edges of the property in what were called Connemara cottages, and in 1871 cypress trees were planted as ornamental trees. In 1872, fencing of 16 acres was completed with the planting of rosa multiflora at a cost of 800 rs. Old Ootacamund was to be planted with grass, rose and trees in the manner of the English garden, and the cost was put at 4000 rs, and administration was shocked but sent 2000 rs for the project, which entailed 60 or 70 acres to be enclosed as park and walk ways (ibid 40). In the long run there was no sign of expenditure, work or relics of the proposed park, and the land was left to develop by the rules of nature ( ibid 41). Northeast of Stonehouse is the first British cemetery with a soldier called Harrington buried there in 1823, and in 1830, Miss Eliza Mcleod was also interred there. It not being a consecrated cemetery, an oak tree planted by Mr Sullivan was the only witness, and his son secured its continuity by not permitting it to be chopped down when Stonehouse became a government building ( ibid 41).The tree was still in existence in 1908 when Frederick Price wrote his forward to his book, which was a detailed report on land relations and property transactions in the 19th century ( ibid 42). John Sullivan promoted the idea of a sanatorium and set up gardens in Dimhatti and later in Ootacamund. Here he cultivated British fruits and vegetables and planted apple and peach trees as early as 1821 (ibid 43). Sullivan rented his houses to the government at a very high cost, and promoted the idea of horticultural experiments, for which he officially received 1910 acres, of which he fenced 200 acres for his personal use, never sharing his ambitions with anyone, or leaving sign of his proposed work on growing trees or planting vegetables. In 1829 the Government complained to the Court of Directors that Sullivan had ownership of land five times above the collective of settlers put together (ibid 44). Price concludes that because Sullivan failed in his agrarian pursuits, the land remained beautiful. Eight years of Sullivan’s control was followed by Kelso who brought in the institutional mechanisms of colonialism specifically the barracks, or the cantonment as it was called. Roads, residences and sanitation all improved for the utility of the British colonial presence. The discovery of Ootacamund was not Sullivan, according to Price, but attributed to the Collectors of Tanjore and Guntur, Kindersley and Whish. The lake was certainly in Sullivan’s plan of making Nilgiris accessible to administration, military and native functionaries but it was done by the simple expedient of damming up several streams. Further, the reflections of the government was that Sullivan neglected his duties in the districts apportioned to him, and spent most of his time in the Nilgiris ( ibid 47). Sullivan wanted credit for his contribution to the discovery and development of Nilgiris, but he was publicly denied them in a report by Government in 1830 (ibid 45). The Paper Trail of Colonial Transactions Deborah Sutton’s careful analyses of government documents follows the narrative of Frederick Price’s book Ootacamund, which is a commissioned report (1912) on the evolution of the town of Ooty. Methodologically, Sutton’s book ‘Other Landscapes’ is important because it works with local archives in India and UK, following the trail of Fredrick Price and hisbibliography to contest imperial preoccupations with taking over the land of local communities. It sets up a dynamic between local communities and their claims over ‘land, people, objects, structures’ and the strategies of colonial bureaucracy and vested interests of plantation settlers. (Sutton 2009: 8). In trying to understand the nature of transformation of the ‘village, the forest, the settlement and plantation’, she wishes to understand resistance as the basic substratum of indigenous peoples to colonization. The forms of continuous evolution of these categories also points our attention to concepts which we use in Sociology such as migrants, caste, class, race and tribe. Sutton’s basic questions are about sedentarization of land, revenue collection in the colonial state, the intermediaries permitting accommodation between local communities and colonial forces. (ibid 9). She sees this process of transformation in the setting up of stabilizing institutional structures such as houses, hospitals, barracks, clubs, schools and gardens, along with the imposition of colonial law. This facilitated the entry of civilians, administrators, military and police. Since entry prioritized laissez faire policy of the early visitors to the Nilgiris, who climbed the hills and built houses, then sold them or leased them or gifted them, the rule of Law was often at variance with the actions of mercenary traders or settlers ( ibid 15). In 1829, nine Todas wrote a petition saying that they had lived in the Nilgiris ‘since time immemorial’ and had been considered to be the masters of these forests (ibid 18). The petition was witnessed by Sullivan who had built the first stone house and mediated between the Todas and the colonial bureaucracy while being a member of the latter. The term “gudu” was used by them to say that the received compensation, for lands which had been alienated was not sufficient for the building of public institutions. The petitioners did not contest colonialism, they wanted higher compensation matching the payments made by individual settlers like Sullivan and protection of their grazing lands. The petition meant that the Todas would demand the codification of their rights and the possibility of reinterpretation and interrogation in courts of laws and revenue offices ( ibid 18,19). The relation between Todas, Kotas and Badagas was complementary, and their co -relation was understood in relation to what the colonists called wastelands, but which for these forest inhabitants was certainly the commons. Clearly there was forceful appropriation by the colonists by offering small sums of money to a nomadic community/pastoral community and then when refused, just taking over the land. Sutton writes, that in the case of the Badagas, they remonstrated against the usurpation of their lands in Old Coonoor. Thomas who mediated out of self interest said that the Badagas had said to the Madras Government, ‘True, you give us money for our land, we take it and spend it, on cattle or jewels–but our land is irrevocably gone and what are our children, who must live by the land, to do?” ( ibid 96) Thomas was what Sutton calls a synechdoche or a representational figure for the colonial administration. “A petition written in 1863 recalled Thomas’ part in the violence of the displacement. Badagas remembered Thomas as the man who ‘Took 12 canies [sic] of land ... we refused ... and at that time he ordered to keep us in the Cutcherry and took our former ground.’ (ibid 97). Further, as the local communities had long memories of the deprivations forced upon them, The barracks had unleashed upon the land a new society of soldiers, engineers and camp followers who knew and cared little about the arrangement and priorities of the local communities (ibid 98) While the British had given assurance that their would be no trespass over the lands of local communities by their people, the camp followers spilled over, and preferred to live outside the barracks, fearing molestation by soldiers (ibid 98). There was no recording of the everyday terrorization of people by those who wished to appropriate land. Between 1828 and 1832, land was classified in 15 different ways. British settlers thought the commons was uncultivated land or wasteland. In Ketti, the local revenue pattas were burnt by ‘accident’ in 1832. Since the Badagas practiced shifting cultivation, the pattas or witness representations of land ownership were found hard to decipher, as they asserted that they had farmed the lands for four generations before houses were built ( ibid 57, 58). The British established evidence for the “absence of cultivation” from the memories of European informants. In April 1837, the Badagas from Keti accepted Rs 853-4-5 in compensation for the land lost during the six years that it had been included in the government farm. They refused, however, to accept the compensation for the land now kept by government, claiming that ‘we have possessed these lands from time immemorial, they have been manured and tilled in a manner suited to the best cultivation ... in addition to this, ... our deity lives there and ... if we sell it, we shall be unfaithful to him’( ibid 62 ). The Badagas, like the Todas at Ootacamund, chose to recognise the money on offer to them as part of a transaction from which they were free to withdraw. The British saw refusal as tantamount to getting the land for free. After one year, the compensation offer would lapse, and money be returned to the treasury (ibid 63. The Badagas, unlike the Todas, received less preferential treatament and were typecast as indolent and savage. Badaga land tenure was thought to be in need of reformation at the end of the 1850s. By the late 19th century, the land was sought to be revenue lands, in order to control shifting cultivation, which had been abolished by the British in 1862. (ibid 48). The manual of 1849 had asserted that the colonial state was the primary landlord. The cadastral and cartographic survey carried out by Captain J. Ouchterlony, both settler and owner of coffee plantations in Wynad was to set up the limits of a nebulous landscape and provide a survey of the manufactures and products of the hills as well as the scientific aspects of botany and ethnology (ibid 53). After measuring existing agriculture of local communities at 23, 772 acres, Ouchterlony generously allowed 200,000 acres for colonial intervention (ibid 34).When the manual passed into law, the British started to use maps only to define the administrative limits of settler occupation, a jigsaw puzzle of ownership to be assessed rather than the picture of a landscape. Since the manual demanded that ownership be defined in terms of leases the notion of ownership was always in question, and there was tension between settlers and administrators. Until 1857, in mediating between, ‘advancing European and the receding native occupier’, Collector Edward B. Thomas had deliberately discouraged the grant of new lands to indigenous communities nearby the three European settlements, preferring to keep hill communities settled in ‘distant localities’ (ibid 38). As a result, it was local communities who were to be spatially restricted ( ibid 56). The building of the barracks meant that indigenous people were edged out, and did not access their traditional pasture lands (ibid 85). Captain Francis, the Military Engineer who oversaw the construction of the barracks planned the building of a dam which would flood Badaga land (ibid 86). Ouchterlony, (the colonial surveyor) had included in his map certain areas outside of the barracks, which was Badaga land. Old Coonoor had also been assimilated into the property of the British state. In 1851, the military decided to appropriate this land in practical terms. The Badagas resented this and demanded the safety of passage for their cattle, and the holy stone belonging to the neighbouring Todas to be protected (ibid 87). The shola or evergreen forest was destroyed, and the stone too was damaged (ibid 88). In 1852, the Badagas of Old Coonoor refused to accept the Rs 150 annual compensation granted to them two years before (ibid 89). This led the Collector W. E Underwood to believe that the precedent of paying compensation would later be used by indigenous communites as an obstacle to land transfer to the British (ibid 37). Artisans and camp followers encroached into protected Badaga land, as they did not want to be in the proximity of soldiers, fearing molestation ( ibid 38). Land considered to be sold by manipulated pattas as having been formerly shifting cultivation was condoned by the British ( ibid 39) Protests from local communities were met with baffled incredulity by purchasers ( ibid 57). There was no question either of equality or of visibility of the local vendor. The colonists represented Badaga villages as being a couple of ‘wigwams’ which had to be bought off rather than constituting a settled village. Settlers with proposed plantations needed to be near Toda and Badaga villages, to benefit from manure, firewood and labour ( ibid 58) On the other hand, administrators and plantation owners continued to complain about Badaga and Toda cattle using pathways on settlement land ( ibid 59). Tension between grazing lands as legitimate Badaga grounds, and the ambition of tea planters with pattas was the matter of much dispute. The British were also able to harness much land by neglect of registering pattas, and simultaneously submitting claims with nervous or eager anticipation (ibid 63). Suppression of the natives was required in order to establish plantations, they were summarily told to resettle on the other side of the river. When told that was Kota land, the colonists maintained that the grass lands they appropriated from the Badagas and Todas were unworthy of breeding cattle, and were wastelands. When the Badaga cattle breeders used their customary paths, the colonists complained saying that they were walking over their fields ( ibid 64). Benefitting from the illiteracy of local community, the settlers were able to put individuals who had promised grazing land sale but then defaulted, into jail ( ibid 69) Settlers often claimed more land than they had actually procured, thereby ousting indigenous populations, but were implicated in law court cases only if they had provided proof that they had usurped forest land, which was under the rule/ ‘monopoly’ of the British ( ibid 72). By taking away wasteland from indigenous communities in order to tax cultivable land, the commons was rendered a redundant category (ibid 73). Since cultivable land had to be distinguished from grazing land, the Collector John Sullivan had systematized the soil classification without increasing the previous taxable amount (ibid 82) Eight classifications of soil used by Badaga cultivators were noted by the Malabar Collector for the purposes of tax collection, a figure which, by the 1850s, had increased to nineteen. These classifications, reduced to levels of revenue assessment by systems of fiscal administration, were derived from a complex typology of soil classifications. Fields bore names according to their location, crop and soil. It seems that the Badagas, though an expanding, settled agricultural community, adapted their agrarian regime to the fragility of the soil, limiting permanent agriculture to valley floors and using extensive fallow over the thin hillside soils. This strategy is in stark contrast to the techniques employed by early settlers who were convinced that the landscape could be manipulated and reworked. Ouchterlony, for example, noticed that the Badagas ‘failed’ to strip the top soil from swamps, a strategy immediately used by settler agriculturists to enrich thin soils elsewhere ( ibid 82) Badaga sale of grains, butter, opium, honey, plant products for material, ritual and culinary purposes, and milk products happened in Coimbatore, and Kota and Toda members would join them. Most of this cash transaction for hill goods was conducted between communities, and among their own people. They were able to buy jewellery from Malabar, and procure what they needed such as iron bars for their axes and ploughs, and currency for tax payments, from their sales of wheat, wax, honey and opium. Their cultivation cycle was from April to December, while in January to March, they repaired houses, collected firewood and prepared for the long season of work on their lands and with their cattle ( ibid 83). Land rights remained abstract, as descriptions provided by settlers were vague, and could not be verified. Badagas too were accustomed to use value of land, and could not specify when and where their cattle grazed The state was not in possession of any comprehensive cadastral or cartographic knowledge in the mediation of land grants and sales. The only authoritative knowledge held by the state over land was its possession of the power to grant land. While the local authorities could question, and very occasionally reverse, the purchase claims of settlers during disputes, the claims in this case were against not only the settler but also, by merit of his grant, the authority of the state. The state could find for the indigenous claimant against the colonist only when involved as a third party, ostensibly mediating between indigene and settlers ( ibid 65). The utilization of the commons by Badagas was now limited by the category of waste lands owned by the British. They would now have to compete with settlers at public auctions to retain or buy land from the colonial state ( ibid 97). Inability to pay rents and taxes meant that hill communities were absorbed into labour in tea plantations. Since by the late 19th century the shifting cultivation was seen to be deleterious for revenue cultivation and production of taxes, the land which was once grazing or cultivable lands for local communities became taxable plantation land. Revenues from plantations were higher than those of the commons.To meet revenue demands, Badaga turned to wage labour, and when plantations were low in production during famine or drought years, they were not paid, but had outstanding credit with merchants. Once they were paid, they reimbursed the merchants but did not have much money remaining to them (ibid 99). The Badaga took to selling firewood to the barracks which used two tonnes a day, as approximately 400 fires burned everyday in colonial hearths ( ibid 109). However cutting of forests was statistically higher by the forest department which needed clearing for coffee, cinchona and tea plantations. However local communities were blamed for deforestation though the felling by them was not statistically equivalent to the colonial authorities ( ibid 111). Since de forestation and the coming of settlers led to the appropriation of springs for private uses, and other consequences the administrators set down certain rules regarding “wastelands” and cutting of the sholas. The Director of forests decreed that springs must be protected, trees above 4500 feet should not be cut to protect rainfall, and the aesthetics of the landscape must be preserved (ibid 115).The tea planters challenged the directive saying that tea could not be propagated below 5000 feet and there were already precedents for deforestation by other planters. However, it was the local communities who were thought by forest officers and planters to be the greatest threat to the forest by practices such as grazing, hunting and shifting cultivation ( ibid 116). The protection of sholas was now seen to be the purview of colonial administration, and the reservation of shola forests to marginal spaces such as swamps and ravines promoted. Taxation of forest dwellers for constructing cattle pens of homes was part of the manner in which the forests were defined as belonging to the British. After castigating the Badagas for causing forest fires, the British planters started to invent a whole new forest for commercial use with imported acacia saplings from Australia. By the late 19th century, the total area of gum tree plantations for construction and fire wood purposes was 1019 acres. Once the shola were cleared, the acacia, coffee, tea and cinchona plantations were accorded the status of aesthetic landscapes. The relations between planters and local communities were based on indifference on the part of the latter who refused to take interest in planting acacia and cinchona on their lands, and continued to use old grazing pastures which were now planters cash crop gardens (ibid 123). The planters also demanded that given the profitability of cash crops, it should be understood that plantations should be on shola lands, not on grasslands( ibid 125). The London and Madras governments was against the belligerence of the Shola protectors and the destruction of the forests by the planters. Forest officers however were protective of the planters, as the acacia and eucalyptus plantations had proved to be extremely rotten, vulnerable to disease, and as saplings eaten up by hares ( ibid 126).There were ideological differences between administrators. Men like H. E Sullivan protested about the large acreage put under reservation, but the counter argument was that this would lay restrictions on Badaga grazing, which would benefit the planters ( ibid 138). From those who were biased toward the planters, being proprietors themselves, the argument was that felling Shola would promote tourism, as visitors to plantations would now be able to access the waterfalls (ibid 140). The preservation of shola forests was entirely because of the aesthetic promotion of leisure tourism, but these too were under threat from the plantations. The exoticisation of the Toda was a necessary aspect of creating surveillance and classification as a mode of administration, according to Kavita Philip ( ibid 159). The problem with colonial classification was that the Toda were a dispersed population, with many different names for the same topographical features, and prohibitions for entry or naming for specific individuals including women ( ibid164). One of the problems of alienation of Toda patta through lease to planters, was that it was considered invalid and posed the contradiction of being part of the commons on which the Toda munds or settlement was paying taxes, though the land had been sold for individual gain. These were then called ‘Toda cases’ as they went to court, and the resolution was that such land either went to the Government as waste land, or could be retained by the buyer, who was a planter ( ibid 166). All the varied contestations over dubious land deals led to the Toda being, in the name of spiritual and religious integrity, forced to remain in reservations which consisted of shola, buildings and cattle pens. In 1883, the British legally decreed that all privileges to the Toda were to the tribe, not to individuals, and so no individual could sell land. The Toda resisted pattas without individual names, and it was thought by the tehsildar that such erosion of individual names would mean no control over tax payers ( ibid 167). Both Kavita Philip and Deborah Sutton have used interdisciplinary methods, bringing into focus the manner by which colonial anthropologists played a political part in domesticating the landscape and people for imperialist profit. Tea plantations in particular played an important part in post globalized economies, as climate change made many latitudes incapable of growing tea, as monsoon patterns became variable. Universities, according to Baldeep Singh,( a former President of the Tea Planter’s Association in India and in Uganda) became a necessary platform to understand the future of tea production and consumption. Labour relations and life in the lines for cooli labour continued much as in colonialism, with the possibility that co operative tea estates, as in Munnar, Kerala could be the resolution of disparities. For this, ethnography will provide answers. References Paidipaty, Poornima. L. 2010. Tribal Nation: Politics and the Making of Anthropology in India 1874-1967 Unpublished PhD thesis Columbia University. Philip, Kavita 2003 Civilising Natures: Race, Resources and Modernity in Colonial South India Delhi: Orient Blackswan Price, Frederick 2012 Ootacamund, A History Delhi: Rupa Sutton, Deborah 2009 Other Landscapes Chicago: NIAS Press Acknowledgements: This review essay was made possible by the kindness of Saagar Tewari, Renny Thomas, Tanweer Fazal, Lam Khan Piang, Rabi Prakash, Rukun Advani and Deborah Sutton, who facilitated my access to books and internet materials

Arcot Lutheran Mission, Tiruvannamalai:Dalit Re-Negotiations

Notes for Dalit Renegotiations: Arcot Lutheran Church in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. Religion is an epiphenomenon. Caste identity is a substratum. This listing or labeling is a process of social exclusion. Religion is about two generational or three generational choice about belongingness. Thus there may be Hindu or Christian Dalits in the same family. Rituals can be shared, or participated in across religious boundaries. Food associated with ceremonies can cross borders, as can choice of marriage partners. Ideology as Social Fact and Cultural Representation Caste has many commonalities with Race primarily in terms of how individuals are identified with domination or servility. Those who dominate others can use any excuse to do so and often use tradition or the collapsing of time across hundreds of years (‘This is how it always was’). Money, ritual hierarchy, political clout all work to underline hierarchy. Therefore, Dalits are assimilated into working class configurations because the Master class demands it. Within this, there is the further socialisation within the lower caste to accept their humiliation, and to engage with the master class with the paraphernalia of a learned passivity. Didier Fassin writing of the dangers of being black, young and living in the suburbs of Paris, argues that running from the police, even when not guilty, is the embodied memory that teenagers have of being caught, interrogated, and possibly imprisoned. They do not know why they are running, but this very act of escaping is a collective phenomenon, for they expect to be ill treated (Fassin 2013: 9,10). This embodied memory of hunger, deprivation, joblessness, lack of access to institutions and the privileges of citizenship is what Dalits carry with them. However educated they become, however respected professionally, they communicate that they come from communities which have been continually suppressed since time immemorial. Films like Patal Lok, Jai Bhim and Article 15 look at the plight of the poor in relation to the coercive power of the police or the State, representatives of whom enter into vituperative dialogues to communicate warrior hood and domination. This language is renegotiated with the appearance of the compassionate policeman, the discerning lawyer and the keen journalist. Each of them is able to document the everyday violence that the poor experience by charting a course of life and work, which uses the trope of the charismatic actor in Weberian terms. Such a person uses the charter of normative rules to carve a path different from those who believe that violence is a given in traditional society, having ritual or ecclesiastical legitimacy. In this respect allegiance to Periyar is something which goes along with a deep belief in Christological themes of deliverance. Dalit family histories are extremely evocative suggesting generations of toil before the family can achieve assimilation into blue collar or white collar status. Biography as Social and Historical Mnemonic Paul’s mother went to Malaysia by ship in the 1930s. Her husband died there. She was advised by people to return to Tamil Nadu. She had a son born in Malayasia, and was destitute, so she came to Lebanon, a Destitute Widows’ and Children Home in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. Her son and his wife came to Tiruvannamalai out of poverty, they were farmers who came because the village was hierarchical, and Dalits had to live in a different quarter. Paul’s father was a teacher in Saron, a boy’s school set up by Arcot Lutheran Mission (ALC) and Paul came there with his parents at the age of four. He has deep love and admiration for the Danish Mission. “We are Christians. For other Christians, Palestine and Jerusalem are the holy places, but for us, it is Denmark.” He went to Europe for three months as a scout leader, spending one month in Sweden, and two months in Denmark in 1987. Tamil Nadu has made the mobility of Dalits possible because of education. Education is the only way by which liberation can be sought. Paul says his grandmother owned only one saree. She washed it in the pond, and waited for it to dry, before wearing it. That is what his father told him. Through education, and the state’s support through salaries and pensions (he retired three years ago at the age of 60) he is able to have a level of prosperity that he could not have imagined as a child. He never thought he could own a house, build his own house. Tamil Nadu has been supportive to farmers and displaced labour. He says that they receive 20 kilogrammes of free, (or very low priced) rice from the ration shop per month. For him, his memories of his grandmother, whom he had never seen, come to him from his father. His father said that she was very strong. Paul has a photo of hers, a small post card - stamp sized one, which a Danish mission lady sent him. He told her his grandmother’s name, and the village she was from. He said, “I have never met her, since she died in 1959”. The Danish missionary recognized his description of her, then sent him a photo of her which was in her files, which he had enlarged and framed. She looks sharp featured, about 50 years old, wearing a silk saree. As for the stigma of being Dalit, he shrugs, and says: “They will not marry us, but we farmers will not marry cobblers’ daughters or fisherpeople’s daughters or Irulas so how are we different? Every community sticks to their own.” Gabriel Dietrich writes in this general context that : “It is very difficult to understand how caste could have survived in the extent it did, in present day Indian society, or why even those people who are at the bottom of the caste hierarchy often stick to the system and insist on treating others as “inferior” while they refuse to question the “superiority” of those who are considered as “higher” ( Dietrich 1992:32, Kawashima 1998:169). Education and Inter Faith Dialogue Facilitation by Quo Vadis in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu Paul says that the upper castes treat Dalits badly, pay them low wages, but like their work. He knows that they as a family escaped the poverty of his forbears because they had education. The very rights that education provide, the liberation, the legal privileges: all of these are conspicuous, but without education there can be no upliftment. He has been part of the interfaith movement, called Quo Vadis, started by his friend Joshua Peter, who tried to bring people of different faiths together, exhorting them to be focused in their own religious practice, but to understand the faith of others (Visvanathan 2022.) Technology has made the world so much easier and cultures compatible. Paul believes that the kingdom of God is within us, and that it is here and now. His deep faith is about practice, generosity, the sharing of ideas, the very nature of post modern communication as a realization of our world as experiential. In The Church for Others and The Church or the World (1967) the World Council of Churches in two reports arising from consecutive meetings with church leaders argues that the concerns of secular society are increasingly important; war and peace, cybernetics, racialism, demography, class, struggle, fundamentalisms. Mission is about history, the Christ of history (WCC 1967: 14). In this task of comparative analyses where sociologists are on call, which is shared with people of other faiths, dialogue is a specialized task with the theologian in charge. Here, the central focus is on the sermon, biblical exegesis, training in discernment, meditative reflections on the contemporary situation (ibid 25). While this is the conventional view of church ecclesiastical functionaries, Joshua Peter and Paul Visuvasam, who are grass roots in their approach, suggest a more intense experiential dialogue process, where people share their faith, opinions and plans in conversational interaction where the leaders rise from the community in everyday praxis (interview 20th July 2022). Like race, caste segregation is ideologically motivated. It allows for dominant or dominating castes to impose their identity politics on lower castes, maintain them in a situation of servility. They may not sit with upper castes, eat with them, marry them, but they can work for them, maintaining the postures of subservience and tacit obedience. Paul says, if someone has money they can mingle, even marry, if two people fall in love, it is possible that their class situation will smoothen the match. However, his daughter says, ‘that it might happen, but usually such lovers get killed.’ (interview 6th July 2022) Schools run by the Lutheran mission are outside of the CSI and CNI. Lutheran mission schools are entirely Dalit, but are open to students of all religions. They were set up by Ziegenbalg, a German missionary, who got land from the British. Carl E.Ochs was a German missionary of the mid-19th century working in South India for the Leipzig Mission because he would not agree to its policy on caste (personal communication Kirsten Neumann Rajendran 21st July 2022), Simon Rasten suggests that the Danish missions were always in contestatory positions with the Nayaka rulers, local chiefs, rival trading posts and indigenous people subsumed within caste hierarchies (what Esther Fihl calls frictions) . He therefore suggests, following Neil Brimnes, that the imposition of colonial practices over the spice trade, essentially followed dialogic processes of culture. It was a constant process of negotiations and interplays at many levels, each actor wishing to encourage translation of views and cultural artifacts. They differentially sought to integrate one another into their exclusive world view. ( Rasten in Filh and Venkatchalapathy 2009: 44). Elisabeth Susan Alexander corroborates this contentious space of colonial ecclesiastical politics by arguing that the European trading posts were the site of Christian missionizing. She writes that Cuddalore was enroute to Madras, interlocked with important towns like Gingee, Tiruvannamalai and Salem. “It was also because it was a significant English settlement that Cuddalore, like Madras, was subject to constant attacks by political opponents as the rising English power negotiated and fought its way to political supremacy in South India by the turn of the 19th century.” (Alexander in Gross, Kumaradoss, Liebau 2006: 379). In such towns, local traders, dubashes, and artisans mingled. Ines Zupanov gives us a fascinating account of caste politics among Jesuit missionaries, where De Nobili’s contestatory Brahminic mode was in stark contrast with that of his contemporary Goncalo Fernandez, who was aware of the presence of the “classifiable” downtrodden and the diverse interests of the Paravas. Zupanov was very clear however that the huge literature produced by the Jesuits in the Madurai mission would percolate down as hymns, treatises, performative acts and literature ( ‘a legacy of the intellect’) to local communities, even when the denominational identity changed with Protestantism. (Zupanov, 1999: 116) Ecclessiastical Bureaucracy of the ALC All the office bearers of the Arcot Lutheran Church are Dalits,as testified by the Church /Parish Directory. Tranquebar Mission as it was called is the Tamil Danish Mission and Tiruvannamalai has the Arcot Lutheran Mission, which is a break away movement. Esther Fihl writes with Stine Simonsen Puri of the time of Ziegenbalg, “During this time another Christian mission - The Danish Missionary Society – also rooted in the Danish – Halle society found its way to the South Arcot district, a little north of Tranquebar. As social workers and educators, the missionaries mainly dealt with families in economic and social distress” ( Fihl and Venkatchalapathy , 2009: 10) Having provided the contestary background to the establishment of the Arcot Lutheran Church, it is interesting to look at the stable environment of the Saron School in Tiruvannamali (Visvanathan 2022}. Saron School is 150 years old, and has children who study in English medium, Tamil Medium and Urdu Medium. It had been established by Sofus Berg, who had arrived in India in 1887, and went on to start a mission station in Tiruvannamalai. The school led to a growing congregation. The emphasis was on spiritual growth as the Danish Missionary Society was against mass movements (Bugge 1994:68). The revivalist movements had meant that there was close scrutiny by the DMS regarding the faith of the believers. It had to be questioned, verified and ratified that the new converts were indeed believers. It is for this reason Joshua Peter had affirmed in personal conversation in 2006, and again in 2022, that there was no increase in numbers of the Arcot Lutheran Church, except by biological and natural reproductive processes. The Danish Missionary Society had been founded in 1821 by Bone Falch Ronne, who had wanted his new society to stand outside all control by the Danish Church (ibid 64). Present Circumstances of ALC Schools The new problems that Dalits in Tiruvannamalai are facing are drug abuse and suicide in the ALC schools. After Covid, the schools are bursting at the seams, more children are coming and are being accommodated. In Saron Boarding School, in Tiruvannamalai, the children are from different communities. There are four schools, and four churches belonging to the Lutherans. Arcot Lutheran Church came into existence by the fact that Tamil Arcot Mission practiced caste, where different castes were given different communion cups. So the Tiruvannamalai mission came as a breakaway mission, where 95 percent of the parishioners are Dalit ( interview Kirsten Rajendran 8th July 2022). Origin of the Arcot Lutheran Church Henriette Bugge writes that “The first missionary to be hired by the DMS was a German, Carl E.Ochs, who previously had been employed by the Leipzig mission in south India. In 1854 he had a serious controversy with the Leipzing Society because he could not agree to its policy on caste. He had subsequently engaged in a bitter and long-winded dispute against the board and his former colleagues which resulted in his retirement from the Leipzig mission. Ochs then set up a mission of his own in South Arcot, but found it difficult to run. In 1863, he approached the DMS with an offer to turn his station at Melpattabakkam in South Arcot over to the DMS. His offer was accepted with enthusiasm and soon two young missionaries fresh from his mission school, were sent out to join Ochs” (Bugge 1994:64). Dalit sense of equality of purpose enriches the community, they feel that their experiential sense of here and now is perfectly in unison. Their sense of belonging in the world is just concrete, welcoming. This was corroborated by Rekha Raj in a presentation on 6th October 2022 at a Gender and Justice conference organized by Christian Institute for the Study of Religion in Manganam, Kottayam, Kerala. She said, “Dalits have a sense of identity and feel a great euphoria. For them citizenship rights are the most important, they are truly secular for they may belong to any religion or ideology, while remaining in the same family.” Yet, as the eclessiastical bureaucrats of the ALC communicate, post Covid trauma is everpresent. Bishop Kennedy feels that children are trying to cope in a post Covid world and need protection from ganja merchants. Three boys in an examination hall were too intoxicated to write the exam. Earlier it was the problem of the colleges but now it has percolated to the schools. To this end he says that they try to rehabilitate the children who have been corrupted. The Arcot Church has planned a study centre in Quo Vadis, a dialogue centre, which had been very successful for two decades of bringing people of different religions together. The unity of the world, of humankind is premised on the assumption that difference is to be celebrated (Visvanathan 2022). The Quo Vadis Centre and Library in Tiruvannamalai Rajendran is the co ordinator of the Quo Vadis, in settting up a syllabus for interfaith dialogue. He and his wife are theologians, former teachers at the Madurai Theological College. He is a student of Gabrielle Dietrich, whose name ALC members take very often with pride. This preoccupation with continuing interest in Dalit history and Christology makes Tiruvannamalai an interesting place for them to live in after retirement. Rajendran’s wife , Kirstine mentions that her father in law was also a pastor, and that every day, he cycled from church to church to carry the Lord’s word. These were essentially poverty struck villages, where landless labourers had willingly converted to Christianity. Work, food, belongingness. these were essentially very valuable. After being shunned by others, the ability to feel they belonged was the greatest gift that they received. Caste Hierachies and their Transmission The acclimatization of Ziegenbalg and Plutschau to the caste practices of Arcot was seen as something which was in keeping with respecting cultural codes. Ziegenbalg established a printing press in Tranquebar in 1713 and the first Tamil book to be printed here was a collection of sermons: then came Luther’s Catechism and a translation of the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament” (Bugge 1994: 58). These were not met with pleasure by the adversaries of Ziegenbalg such as the Jesuit C.J. Beschi in Madurai. Infact Ziegenbalg was ridiculed for using a lower class Tamil instead of a higher class Tamil. This was thought to be a serious mistake which would alienate the powerful upper castes from Christianity (ibid 58). It would imply that the missionaries were lower caste people, and unclean, who would pollute the upper castes. A century after Ziegenbalg, Abbe Dubos argued for translations of the Bible as summaries, without references to Jesus keeping company with fishermen, carpenters, and no doubt free women, traditionally referred to as ‘loose’ women (ibid 58). The South Arcot District, consisting of the rural towns of Tiruvannamalai Tindivanam,Villipuram, Tirukoilur, Kallakurichi, Cuddalore, Vriddachalam, Chidambaram ( ibid 14) had its proportion of rural poor, who became a source of mobile labour for the purposes of railway, dam and other colonial construction in the British period. It is to this outcaste population that the DMS worked for, providing them with religious instruction, as well as food, medicine and education from 1860 onwards, when Ochs of the Leipzing mission station merged with the DMS. The Liberal World View of Present Day TLC Theologians Joshua Peter said that “Yes, food is important to the hungry. The symbolism of the Lord’s body as food is ultimately significant. Bread is food, and the hungry are replenished.” The Quo Vadis group essentially keeps the principle of dialogicity alive through songs, conversations and meditational practice. They feel that they can present through lyrics their theology of coexistence. Human rights, freedom from hunger and distress, social inclusion…all of these are immensely important to the community. Church services are well attended bringing in the robust population of believing Christians to Saron church every Sunday. The ardour of women is represented through the choir, and the immediate responses to the parish priest. Women fill in the liturgical services, and the bible reading fragments in loud clear voices. They are able to find the passage requested by the priest in seconds. Evelyn Christensen writes that the unifying dimension of prayer, the presence of life cycle rituals, and the collectivity found in shared worship, because friends, clan members and neighbours are needed at family reunions or crises moments. Faith is the essential binder, and with it the understanding that God answers prayers. ( Christensen 1985: 110) The results of prayer are unity, wish fulfillment, support , transcendence of distance, and cultures, and the ability to forgive (ibid 128). Within the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the church, and its burearucracy, the priest has a predominant position in terms of his direct relation to the place (sacred sites) and people. Gabriel Dietrich writes that the priest is “supposed to be in some sort of perpetual institutionalised communion with God and as such functions as an intermediary between the people and god. …serves to perpetuate and to institutionalize religion by the performance of rituals, the formulation of religious theory and sometimes by the foundation of religious institutions, and therefore gives continuity and stability to religion . While the existence of priesthood is very important for safeguarding the continuity of religious traditions and often also for the transmission of knowledge and education, there are certain inbuilt mechanisms in the priestly profession which tend to make it a conservative, stabilizing force, but also often anoppressive and retarding force. The very privilege of being in communion with God gives the priest an opportunity to bestow on or withhold from people the benefits of the communion.“ (Dietrich 1991:17). Kirsten Rajendran draws attention to the fact that Arcot Lutheran theology draws deeply from the Nayanmar traditions of South India. Underlying the practices and beliefs of the local community are a sound understanding of how Saivite worship, and the understandings of the Siddhis, as poets, inform people’s religious practice. (personal communication 18th July 2022) Pastor Daniel said that the Covid years affected the poor in the community very terribly. Yet, there was a prayerful generosity which came from those who whole heartedly came out to help those in circumstances more difficult than their own. They were able to support families which were stranded in their town during Covid. Part of the problem of the breakdown between the federal aspects of democracy and the rule of the Centre can be understood in terms of the failure of bureaucracy, and the alliance between vested political interests in government and the bureaucrat. Dalits and Survival during Covid All over the subcontinent the bureaucrat/clerk has a bad reputation. Files are always pending, money changes hands, there is too close an alliance between bureaucrats and politicians, and women are usually marginalised. When criminality is rampant, then bribes are seen as being only that ‘mild an event’ as tax evasion. Nepotism and clan loyalties are seen to be normal, as is favouring of friends and loyal subordinates. Satish Saberwal argued in Wages of Segmentation that bureaucracy in India is enmeshed in village and caste and clan loyalties, that because industrialisation was imposed on us in the 19th century, the real adaptative process never took place. The partisan bureaucrat, when acting in a friendly and intimate fashion, can reorder reality by promoting the good of some people over the good of the citizens whom he purportedly serves. Since the process of going to the courts is a disruption of daily duties and obligations, the bureaucrat as robber baron, who has government employees as lawyers working for him, can create tremendous obstacles to the real issues surfacing. Since bureaucracy and its contracts are linked with personages and with codified or inscribed materials, the robber baron bureaucrat is well able to relieve honest officers of their duty or to transfer them, where they cannot be of harm to him/her/they. Yet, even with digitalisation of files, all materials are up for scrutiny, and so opaque and self gratifying acts become visible to all, unless we are functioning in an oligarchy. With this framework in mind, we can well understand why food distribution to people in camps or villages was not made possible during Covid, why 44,000 crores of rupees was made unavailable for this purpose, and millions of workers were forced to walk back home. Redistribution of Food as Ethics of Coexistence During Covid 19 in Arcot Lutheran Church There was a circus which had come to the town, with artists and animals. During lockdown 2020 -2021, they were stranded in Tiruvannamalai with 60 crew members and their animals. Pastor Daniel, parish priest of the ALC, felt really sad for them, but when they asked for help (money), he agreed to provide them three meals a day with the help of his parishioners. No one in his parish had money, but they collected food, and Rev Daniel saw to it that they were fed for two months of their incarceration. The circus manager locked all the artists into separate camps, all the young girls were put into one tent, and not allowed to go out. They were literally self incarcerated there for two months, but luckily neither they nor their animals suffered any fatalities. Poverty is something Dalits remember well, and worse, destitution, but their ethic is to surrender to fate, and to remember those who had helped them. In turn, when they are able, they immediately provide what they have to others to share. It is like Christ’s story of the old woman who shared everything she had, giving away her only coin to help others in destitution. Lebanon: Weavers, Widows and Sanctuary for the Destitute Thyagarajan is the manager of the Destitute home in the Arcot Lutheran Campus of Lebanon. His family came to Tiruvannamalai on the invitationof Dan Mission in 1959, when he was ten months old. They were farmers, from the caste of goldsmiths, invited in to farm the land, and because they were poor, they agreed, and were given a small house on the Lebanon campus. They stayed on, and joined the community, and served the church. They were Hindus, but converted to Christianity, though he says that there was no compulsion or requests. Of the dozen weavers under his care, most remain Hindus. Thyagarajan manages the home for destitute women three days a week, and returns to his home in Cuddalore, 100 kms away. He introduced me to the weavers whom he supervises. They make cotton towels, bedcovers and bags from yarn procured from Chennai or Kanchipuram. Their wages are meager, the church is not permitted foreign funds, the tourists who would come from Denmark, and Germany and USA stopped arriving after Covid 19. The work went on, though the abject condition of Dalitness does not go away. The women, came in to Lebanon as widows by invitation, brought up their children on campus, the children grew up, found jobs and got married, having children of their own, and jobs in nearby cities like Bengaluru and Chennai. Nothing really changes in their lives, they do not see Christianity as opening new doors to prosperity, but atleast they feel that they are free from caste abuse, and have a room of their own with free water and electricity, with frequent hand outs of garden produce. After many decades, Lebanon is beginning to start organic farming, and they produce some vegetables, coconuts and fruits. But now, they are keen to begin rice cultivation. The well which is 150 years old, like the school and home for destitutes, can actually provide water for cultivation. But that too, is hard work, requiring a pair of bulls, or a tractor. Once they find the funding they will be able to start farming in earnest. Thyagarajan says that Dan Mission’s logos has always been “For God and India.” He understands the right to be Indian as something intrinsic to the life they have in Lebanon. There are prayers, hymns, Eucharistic services, Sunday School in the Lutheran church, but the destitute women are only witnesses to the hardwork of the missionary women Miss Else and Miss Lindenmayer who worked immensely hard till old age and death overcame them as the trustees of Lebanon campus. These widows have never thought to leave the campus. Their children grow up, find menial or low paid jobs in the city, marry, bear children. They may or may not come to collect their mother, and take her with them, but often the women remain where they are fearing the consequences of being trapped in smaller living spaces in urban ghettos, and losing what little freedom they have. Sometimes, out of their tiny stipend they save money to visit their children, and in turn, their children sometimes help them financially. Paul Gilroy writes that “race and nation, the higher and the lower become integrated in this vocabulary in the life of the camps, The dominant varieties were bound to the subordinate by their shared notions of what nationality entailed. The forms of nationalism that invoke that mode of belonging exemplify camp-thinking. They have distinctive rules and codes, and however bitterly their various practitioners may conflict with each other, a common approach to the problem of collective solidarity is betrayed by shared patterns of thought about self and other, friend and stranger; about culture and nature as binding agents and about the technological institution of political collectivities to which one can be compelled to belong.” (Gilroy 2000: 82) If Dalits have survived on subsistence farming traditionally or on foraging, today they feel that their children have needs for education and for social mobility. A glance, a kind word from the camp manager is highly valued. A sense of tactility is also missing and deeply sought. Words are comforting, as is the presence of the superintendent, who had 9 siblings all of whom grew up on the Arcot Lutheran Campus. Where church institutions are denigrated by the state, and the term ‘rice christians’ used with contempt, Arcot Lutheran missionaries remember Else Kroj with affection. She came as a young woman and took care of all of them. She was a school teacher from Denmark, who spent her life in Tiruvannamalai in charge of the Saron school, and living in a missionary house in the campus of the home for destitute women. She did not set herself above the poor whom she ministered to. If children were naughty and the teachers complained, she said “ Let them be, don’t overburden them, teach them, and in the holidays, let them go home” (interview Paul Visuwasam 9th July 2022) She was the great Mother, the presence of the great comforter, who lived in austerity and in the company of the poor. A lot of the anger against Christian missionaries is because it is felt that they are taking people away from Hinduism. However, the poor are considered to be outcaste. As a result, their suffering and affliction is not considered worthy of interest. It is believed that because of their karma in their past they have been reborn as the lowest of the low. However, they have a sense of self worth, coming from community identity, something which the collater of Ambedkar’s collected works, Vasant Moon, described in detail as the charms of living in the chawl (Moon 2001). Living in Tamil Nadu, Dalit Lutherans feel that the state is supportive. The state provides a sense of well being and succor. Rations are freely available to each family, and mission schools like Dan mission also provide state supported salaries to the teachers, with pensions when they retire. What happened to Fr Stan Swamy in Maharashtra could never happen in Tamil Nadu, according to them. There are church quarrels, and church skirmishes, but these are quickly handled in a rational fashion. Theologians trained in Lutheran theological colleges in Madurai or Chennai return with a sense of self confidence, a mastery over liturgy, hymns and scriptures. Sermons and hymn singing, prayer and meditation are thought to have tremendous power in each life. The Hymns of James Theophilus Apavoo Zoe C Sherinian writes that her fieldwork among Dalit Christians showed that their struggles were represented through the lyrics composed by Reverend James Theophilus Appavoo At Tamil Theological Seminary, Madurai. He observed that the classical Carnatak music to which hymns had been transposed, did not make sense to contemporary Dalits working emotionally with their sense of being crushed, continually excluded. Apavoo used his music lessons in the seminary to integrate students around the questions of equality and freedom. He used folk songs and the parai drum to break down the hierarchies between musical forms. He wished to integrate psychology, the environment, gender and spirituality to traditional Marxian concerns for economics, politics, social structure and ideology. Women’s rights became integral to his composition of hymns and liturgies. His classes involved true dialogue, learning from rural students about music practices traditionally known and understood by them and feeding into the liturgies that he wrote. It helped them to have pride in their dalit identity and history, evade superior Brahmanical hegemony, and to represent their desire to repudiate exploitative practices. (Zoe. C Sherinian www Galeacademic one file..Annual 2005 Women and Music, Vol 9 University of Nebraska Press accessed on 23rd July 2022) The ability of the pastor to communicate with his flock is the sense of belongingness in Christian community, where parishioners impervious to their class sit next to one another in the pews. Here, too, there is an acceptance of the state, so that both fealty and the right to protection are seen as equivalent. The Dravidian State has the power to communicate its rights to survive and provide for its people. It does not see itself as anything but carrying on a long legacy of the self respect movement. It can take on right wing fundamentalism and provide the Dalits a sense of citizenship and rights. But hierarchies do not disappear, poverty does not vanish. Race is about phenotypical characteristics genetically passed down. Racism is something else, it is about hierarchical domination which seeks to subjugate the outclassed, the declassed. Being outside the system, Dalits feel that assimilation is a primary requirement. How can this belongingness to the State be brought about? Part of the difficulties come from wanting to be mobile, to share the privileges of a global economy. More than anything, they want to share in the fruits of modernism. As long as education is sidelined, and funds and money diverted there is no hope for mobility. The Wrath of the State When Stan Swamy canvassed for the rights of 3000 undertrials who had been locked away, the police saw in him the great dangerousness that come from activists for human rights and education. The contributions he made to the survival strategies for tribal communities in Jharkhand were huge. The Investigating officer who interrogated him on the suspicion that he had engineered riots during Elgar Parishad commended him on his work with migrants returning home to tribal villages during Covid. What was this work that his work station provided access to? He says to the NIA, recorded for the reader in “I Am Not a Silent Witness” published by the Indian Social Institute, Bengaluru : About the activities of Bagaicha, we recently have started a Migrants’ Desk, and its intervention during and after the recent lockdown, due to the coronavirus pandemic was significant. It was necessitated by the sudden declaration of lockdown, throwing millions of migrant workers out-of-work, shelter, food and forcing thousands of them walk on highways and railway tracks for hundreds of kilometres. Our Migrants’ Desk (MD) is linked with governments, NGOs and human rights groups, to reach out to the migrants to offer immediate relief in the form of food and shelter and help them to reach their homes. We have helped at least about 6,000 persons, who were in precarious situations. Lakhs of them have reached home, but is there anything in their homes to sustain them and their families? (Swamy 2021:89-90) Distinction between Literacy and Education Education allows people to move forward, to assimilate, to join the professional classes. However politicians of ruling parties who create obstacles for the education of the poor, use the police to block further chances for upward mobility. It is this that is the entrenched reason for keeping the poor in chains. Here, all Indians become complicit in the ruling ideology of caste, based on Suvarna theory. There are oppositional forces in every post World War 2 society. They confront one another, and if not embedded in dictatorship, they are free to engage with one another in legal transactions. What we confront in India are two situations: belief in the Indian Constitution on one hand, and on the other hand, for their antagonists belief in the rule of Manu’s laws. These are not compatible, and lead to immense fury and bloody warfare. Whether it is RSS against Communists and vice versa, or RSS against Christians, Muslims, Dalits, Tribals, the violence and accusations of terrorism is no longer episodic. To even support the case of Dalits and Tribals is now infused by the wrath of the State. The interpenetration of uppercaste and /or upper class commercial deals, which have the blessing of the judiciary now takes away all the rights to citizenship given by the Indian Constitution to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Fr Stan Swamy showed that patronage to the mining companies was essentially protected by the machineries of the State, and that the Judiciary too became partisan in the provisioning of justice. Of the 3000 undertrials for whom he put in judicial petitions, only three had Maoist links. The very bases of the 5 lakh fine placed on Himanshu Singh on 14th July 2022, for petitioning against the attack on tribals, is a similar move to keep all enquiries of state violence against declassed tribals suspended. It obliterates their right from ever farming their traditional lands. The need for cheap labour to build smart cities, work in aluminium mines, and build roads has made an entire population of tribal/scheduled caste communities now available as cheap labour to contractors, by sheer expediency. Socialism, Gandhism and Right to Life and Human Rights in general are now as problematic to the State, as are ethnic communities and religions which do not convert to fundamentalist Hinduism,or form alliances with the BJP. Kerala and Tamil Nadu stand out in opposition to the Centre, and will pay the costs in terms of privileges granted by the federal obligations of the State, now masked as Hindu Rashtra. The political party which occupies the State is obviously not the State, for as Bezwada Wilson said, in a film made by Jyoti Nisha, on Ambedkar, there cannot be democracy and manual scavenging co existing. Caste as Calculated Hegemonic Device Abraham Ayrookuzhiel suggests that the exclusion of Dalits, their untouchability, their history of degradation is a consequence of continuous invasions, where the indigenous people were colonized and treated as slaves. He points to the idea of Suvarna and Avarna as categories of caste and race distinction, where the indigenous people bore traces of the Austro- Mongoloid, and the Dravidians, conquered in turn by the Aryans, specifically used their countervailing sense of authority over the defeated peoples to make them labour as barbers, fishers, tailors, cultivators, jugglers, musicians and stone cutters, road builders, grave diggers and scavengers. In this context, their conversion to Christianity gave them a semblance of freedom, because they no longer belonged to the subjugated outcastes of Hinduism, or were suppressed by the Dominant Castes. However, their sense of self worth came from their participation in matters of church and local community as free people, recognizing among themselves the quality of equality. Their poetry would be essentially the voice of hunger and loss. In some intuitive sense, the possibility of freedom for the Dalit Christians comes from this overarching sense of their right to live in a caste less society. And yet, three generations of Reservations for Christian Dalits will bring them to the frontlines of professional and educational mobility. Dr Rajaratnam, former Director of Gurukul Lutheran Seminary in Chennai, took 7 years to compile a hymnal in use by students of the college, and published by the Gurukul Lutheran Seminary for its use. In the Introduction he wrote that “we take pride in including a special order of Worship on Dalit concerns.” (vii) He adds ”Dalit worship is unique because it is not just a cultural expression of their joy and sorrow. They are always open and there is no secret at all. Their expression is spontaneous. They communicate all their feelings even in worship as children express themselves to their parents.” (ibid 69) That soul music represented the voice of Dalits in relationship to traditional Christian hegemonic forces in Christianity in Kerala has been made forcefully by P.Sanal Mohan. The hymns represent the continuous struggle that Dalits find themselves and laments of Dalit Christians. Education in the ALC became the focused way by which parishioners hoped for change in social and economic status. In the Appraisal Report on Arcot Lutheran Church School Project (mimeo archives of Gurukul Lutheran Seminary Chennai) the Danish Mission representatives noted that the goals were child centric learning but the text books were State provided, and thus there was a huge gap between intentions and practice. The Report writer/s say” “The concept of the ALC project is captured by the motto “Educate and Elevate” . It is the assumption of the project that improved education can lead to improved quality of life, improved education is in the project related to the consequence of relevance.. i.e what is being taught has to be relevant for the life of the learners. The methodology of the project has to seek to provide improved formal education through improved infrastructure (school buildings furniture, teaching aids) and an improved teaching learning process (teaching training programmes in child-centred learning methods}. Besides, the project has attempted to improve the link between school and community through Parent Teacher Associations and contributions from the Community to the school, and to improve the living conditions of the local communities in the project area, through adult education classes, health and income generating activities, an women’s samgams (gathering). (Mimeo,no author, no date Gurukul Seminary Archives). A representative of the teaching community of ALC in Polur district said that they had a week of consultations with teacher representatives from other districts, which involved discussions on National Education Policy, where the children are meant to be graded into different streams as fast learners, mediocre learners, and slow learners, but she said after Covid 19 and two years of absenteeism, village children have forgotten everything and suffer from short span attention. ( interview 19th July 2022) Reservations for Christians according to Ayrookuzhiel would imply being assimilated in hierarchically lower caste positions when they seek to repudiate caste. He bleakly states that Dalits are being paid to remain within the fold of Hinduism as enslaved people (Ayrookuzhiel 2006:73). A young Dalit Christian woman to whom I put the question, “Do you think non Dalits can speak on behalf of Dalits, or is it a battle only to be fought by Dalits breaking away from the subservience forced on them by the master caste, replied “ I don’t believe in caste”. As Didier Fassin writes about a constant culture of cruelty (our example here is caste), is that “ Violence must be able to find a minimum of justification in the idea the perpetuator has of the person who is subjected to it and who must be made to pay.” (Fassin 2013 :136). The leap that Paolo Freire looked for was the rise of the intellectuals among the grass roots, to speak on behalf of their communities. As M.S.S Pandian argued most powerfully, in a book published by his wife posthumously on behalf of Pandian, it is for people to decide their choice of religion, not the coercive apparatus of the state (Pandian 2019) Dr Susan Visvanathan is Retired Professor and Former Chairperson of CSSS, JNU and currently Adjunct Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IISER Bhopal. Bibliography Alexander, Elisabeth Susan. 2006. Cuddalore in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Political and Social Overview, in Grosse, Andreas, Y.Vincent Kumaradoss, Heike Liebau (Editors). Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India; The Danish Halle and The English Halle Mission, Volume 1. Halle: Frankesche Stiftungen, and distributed by Delhi: Manohar Press Ayrookuzhiel, Abraham. 2006. Essays on Dalits, Religion and Liberation. Bengaluru: Asian Trading Corporation and Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society. Bugge, Henriette. 1994 Mission and Tamil Society, London: Routledge. Christenson, Evelyn. 1992. What Happens When Women Pray. UK: Victor Books. Dietrich, Gabrielle. 1992. Reflections on the Women’s Movement in India: Religon, Ecology, Development. Delhi: Horizon India Fassin, Didier, 2013: Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. Cambridge: Polity Fihl, Esther and A. R Venkatachalapathy. 2009. Special Issue Indo-Danish Cultural Encounters in Tranquebar: Past and Present. Review of Development and Change, Vol X1V NO 1 AND 2 January to December 2009 Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race London: Routledge Kawashima, Koji. 1998. Missionaries and a Hindu State: Travancore 1858-1936. Delhi: Oxford University Press Moon, Vasant 2001. Growing Up Untouchable. New Delhi: Vistaar Mohan P. Sanal 2015 Modernity of Slavery: Struggles Against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala. Delhi: Oxford University Press Rajagopal, Geetha, 2009. Hindu Music in the Temples of South India. Delhi: D.K Printworld. Saberwal, Satish Wages of Segmentation Pandian, M.S.S. 2019. The Strangeness of Tamil Nadu, Ranikhet and Delhi: Permanent Black. Rasten, Simon. 2009. The Tranquebar Tribute in the Reign of King Serfoji 11 in Esther Fihl and A. R Venkatachalapathy in Special Issue Indo-Danish Cultural Encounters in Tranquebar: Past and Present. Review of Development and Change, Vol X1V NO 1 AND 2 January to December Sherinian. Zoe.C. 2005. www Galeacademic one file Annual Women and Music, Vol 9 University of Nebraska Press accessed on 23rd July 2022) Oommen, T. K and Hunter P Mabryu. 2000. The Christian Clergy in India. New Delhi: Sage Zupanov, Ines G. 1999. Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahminical Knowledge in Seventeenth Century India. Oxford University Press Delhi Acknowledgements: Grateful thanks to Gitika De, Tanweer Fazal, P.Sanal Mohan, Jesudas Athyal, Y.T Vinayaraj, Susan Elisabeth Alexander, Vincent Kumaradoss, Ramola Cecil Joseph and Anuradha Sen Mukherjea,Team Quo Vadis in Tiruvannamalai, Daffini, Komalamma and Paul Visuvasam.