Journeys
I was in Chennai again last week, this time for an old friend’s wedding. Lots of friends, old and new, some of whom I hadn’t expected to see there – it was all most pleasing and punctuated with good food and drink and gossip and laughter. There was much angst over which sarees to wear, much debate over whether the saree padars and hair were to be pinned up or not (the fashion police dismissed my preferred pinned-up look as the totally uncool air-hostess look), much ruing of short hair in the face of lovely fresh jasmine flowers, and deep discussions of those occasions when a bindi nicely complements the saree and those when it disrupts it. All of us present were professional academics; what else did you expect us to discuss with such passion?
An old friend and I also decided to take a few days off and ride a motorcycle down a short stretch of the Tamil Nadu coast to see a few sights – the old Danish colony, Tranquebar, the old French territories of Pondicherry and Karaikal, the weaving town of Bhuvanagiri, and Chidambaram, the great temple town and home of the Dancing Shiva, Nataraja, among others. We rode all the way down to Nagapattinam. Using an SLR with a helmet on is not the easiest thing to do when you’re sweating and the road is bumpy, but hey, I even managed a self-portrait.
Innumerable shades of green glint in the winter sun on paddy fields and palm trees, and in between lots of blue-white backwaters and rivulets and old Chola-period water canals, you suddenly come up on the majestic blue ocean. Short and tall, brightly, luridly painted temple gopurams, mosque minarets and church towers dot the landscape and jostling with people in the raucous towns are giant, oversize posters of Tamil political leaders of every political party mouthing overblown rhetoric. Grinding inequality and desperate political struggle is embedded in this stunningly rich, agrarian Kaveri river delta, which witnessed tremendous destruction and loss of life during the ferocious 2005 tsunami. It is impossible for me to try and capture the richness of landscape or history of all the areas we visited in a short blog post or my camera. As I gazed around me, I kept thinking that I was in a Mani Rathnam film, and that Roja would show up any second, singing chinna chinna asai…
It was my first trip to this part of the country, and I think my overwhelming feeling was how little I had absorbed, and a wish to return again as soon as possible. My own current research, such as it is progressing, has to do with Maratha migrants from western India to the southern Kaveri delta region of Thanjavur, their social networks and cultural contacts, etc. Even when I teach the South Asia survey, I sketch with some familiarity broad events and processes such as the economic/agrarian functions of temple complexes, Europeans arriving on the peninsula, the fortunes of the Mughals in the deep south, or the particular braiding of caste and religion, especially Christianity, in this region, etc. etc. But it’s still quite something to confront the sheer diversity of the long history of this area visually, through the architecture, or the diverse cadences of Tamil, Urdu, Marathi, Persian, French, English. (Over beer I subjected a poor, unsuspecting friend to a long, impromptu lecture on the service gentry of the Nawab of Arcot and the Marathas in Thanjavur and the impact on linguistic and bureaucratic practice – all he had done was speak a bit of Urdu-Tamil mix!)
Pondicherry, in particular, is a glorious place, no matter what you go there for – the French-colonial atmosphere, the beach, the diverse creole Tamil-Chettiar-French architecture and cuisines, the experience the bohemian life at Auroville or to visit the Aurobindo ashram.
But one last thing – the food. My ready association with Tamil food all these years has been with Tamil Brahmin food: vegetarian, rice-and-lentil-based bliss, typified by curd-rice-mango-pickle, the best comfort food in the whole wide world. It is possibly my most favourite cuisine of all, and I can easily live on it for months on end.
But on this trip, I had occasion to try some excellent non-vegetarian cuisine, mostly seafood. I had expected it to be very heavily coconut-based, like in nearby Kerala, but it’s not – it is very simple and delicious, if incredibly fiery with black pepper. In the photo immediately below, from left to right, is yogurt, rasam, mutton curry, coriander-chilli paruppu, and garlic prawn, with garlic prawn and another prawn curry in the plate. All to be eaten, one at a time in courses (all this time I thought only the Bengalis, as good derivative discourse folk, ate in courses. Turns out they have company). In the photos below are the best crab curry and fried pomfret I have ever eaten.
Perhaps my favourite discovery, was of the Karaikal halwa, a popular dessert in these parts, and whose provenance I am yet to find out in detail. When my friend first offered it to me as a local delicacy, I demurred, because the shiny red and black stuff looked like large insects that had met with an unhappy, squelchy end. But I am glad I was persuaded to try them, because they were deliciously sweet and nutty, made in ghee. The red stuff is made with almonds, the orangey, crumbly one with grated beet and cream of wheat (like gajar halwa), and the black stuff, by far the best, was of crushed cotton seeds. Yum.
