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No 163 - 2000
Page 4
An English Monk in India
by Fr Edmund Power OSBREMOTE and exotic though India be, Madras/Chennai is a mere nine-to-ten hour flight from London. Yet that handful of hours places you in a world which, though familiar from reading and pictures, is alien on direct acquaintance. You learn surprising lessons about your own capacity to adjust, your tolerance and your flexibility.
All India falls within the same time zone, a morning-land touched by the rising sun four and a half hours before summertime Britain. So at 05.25 on Wednesday, 8 September, we landed at Chennai, one of India's four great cities, the metropolis of the south, capital of Tamil Nadu. Here the original Dravidian culture has continued for thousands of years, touched but lightly by the northern migrations that brought to India the caste system, men of paler hue and the Indo-European Hindi language. The city lies on the east coast, gazing across the Bay of Bengal towards Burma. It was still dark at 05.25, but with that tropical suddenness, so different from the long shifts of light in northern Europe, the pre-dawn grey fled in minutes and it was morning, the first day.
My initial encounter with India, that bewitcher of generations of Britishers, was as unexpected as the sudden immersion into the heat and humidity, a sticky, blanketing atmosphere that prevailed through most of my stay. And there were the people, countless dark faces, walking, standing, jostling, squatting, chattering, labouring, staring. The Indian population is approaching a thousand million, they say, and the concept of personal space is translated out of all recognition.
I gradually adjusted, devising strategies for dealing with the heat: showers with simple sporadic jets or buckets of water. There seems to be little hot water in India, because there is little cold water, but even a jet of lukewarm is refreshing. You sit under electric fans, the modern equivalent of those patient punkah-wallahs, hoping that the daily power-cut, de rigeur in India, will come later rather than sooner and will pass fleetingly. You get used to a musical chairs of shirt-changing, and to a pervading damp stickiness. You avoid open sunlight, minutes of which can burn you; you carry an umbrella for a sunny stroll of a few yards. Socks were entirely redundant and the three shirts I took just about dealt with the constant sartorial cycle.
Insects are rife; one can become almost affectionate about the agile ants, scuttling purposefully over every surface. The main menace is the mosquito, black and determined, insistent and instant, floating in at the soon-falling sundown of the tropics. The bites itch and fade, leaving the faint menace of malaria. Evening demands attention to your arms and ankles. Socks are no protection: penetration of skin, injection of saliva and the ensuing bloody banquet proceed through the impotence of woven wool. Close-fitting clothes and dark things tantalise and attract these winged stomachs, these tiny sharks of the humid air, sharpened by the sniff of sweat, enlivened by the luscious pulse. Night is easier: you lie safe beneath the net, waiting for the runnels of sweat to ease their flow. I gradually became almost blase about mosquitoes.
But let us leave the hum and buzz of insects and take a trip to downtown Chennai. The traffic drives on the left but barely: there is a fluidity and brinkmanship that can terrify those of us accustomed to the discipline of ordered lanes, in place of which the Indians perform a ceaseless cacophony of hooting. One sees no western cars. Motorbikes and scooters are everywhere, weavingly efficient: one scooter may carry the driver, his two children and his elderly mother riding side-saddle at the back, undauntedly placid in her flapping saree. Pollution is worse than anything I have seen in western Europe.
Everywhere people squat and sell; they wander barefoot or in flip-flop sandals, in shortened lungis or trailing sarees. Others move in occidental attire. Western-style advertising hoardings and glitzy buildings gaze over mud huts by muddy rivers; ambling cows are everywhere; they jostle people and vehicles, grazing in heaps of rubbish, chewing contentedly in the middle of busy crossroads, being milked in the road at the fall of day. There are wild cows of ancient breeds; there are frisians; there are black water-buffaloes that do not partake of the sacred status of the cow. Horns are long and curling, sometimes bedecked in bells or painted in bright hues. In one scruffy square stood a flaking statue of George V, king and emperor, gazing blankly towards bulging-bellied, many-armed Hindu deities in gaudy colours, hanging acrobatically on the walls of a small temple: fascination of contrasts, crazy clash of cultures, the most boring and proper of monarchs and the most flamboyant and exhibitionist of religions. The British obsession with India can only be explained as extreme escapism and the lure of opposites.
I was able to make a two day trip inland to see something of village life. The flat plain gradually becomes littered with strange scattered hills, heaps of red rock. This is a vast landscape and an alien one. The vegetation, the geology, the very air are other. There are occasional shocks of recognition: pampered houseplants, confined and dwarf in England, turn out to be huge and vibrant in India, their native land.
The Daughters of Mary Immaculate (DMI) are a new congregation founded in 1984 and now numbering over 450 sisters, most of whom are in their twenties and thirties. Their life is simple; they work hard and their task is to serve the neediest and to go where no one else has dared to go. Near one village they have set up a home and school for children, and gradually, over a number of years, have brought the women of the village together to form a sangam , or self-help group. These women have become confident and focused, pooling their rupees and together pressurising local government for assistance. I was interested to see the reaction of the men, some with wary respect, some with faint suspicion, some feeling threatened. It is extraordinary what women put up with and how much they can achieve against the odds. The result of their collaborative efforts has been improvements in the village life. I was able to sit at the door of a tiny hut, eating roast groundnuts offered by the family of "untouchables" living there. Such contact would be impossible for a Hindu priest. In another smaller settlement of young families, several of the men joined us, full of pride as a group of their children aged from about three to nine stood in a group and sang. Later that evening, sitting out in "the spiced Indian air, by night", a vast night, unpolluted by artificial light, the electricity failed and our few meagre lamps expired. The sudden darkness inflamed the canopy of the stars, and their little disciples, the meandering fireflies, flashed above us among leaves and branches.
I visited a huge temple complex which has stood there for three and a half thousand years, great steep pyramids of elaborately carved grey stone, dim halls, glaring idols and insistent guides with a smattering of English, fixed on the rupees which would follow their gabbled explanations. Barefooted, I was led into an inner sanctuary where a Brahmin priest blessed me and daubed my forehead with red and yellow. But as in all religions, grace has its price, and his benevolence wavered when he discovered that I had no rupees in my pocket. What is surprising about these temples is that they have continued unbrokenly fulfilling the same purpose for so long, and that the iconography of the divine has changed so little over the millennia.
At Mahabalipuram, some thirty or forty miles south of Chennai, I encountered the pounding breakers of the Indian Ocean. There was a reddish beach with a menacing sign in the poetic otherness of Indian English: "Beware Killer Sea, ten have drowned this year, you have been warned enough!" Elsewhere, on a stretch of highway: "Accident-prone road", as though ocean and highway are sinister and clumsy respectively. A sign against trespassers warned that they would be "severely punished and handed to the police", - for medical attention after the severe punishment? Everywhere you encounter turns of phrase that are quaint or whimsical or unexpectedly colloquial. In newspaper columns, instead of "the criminals were arrested", you might read "the miscreants were nabbed" , suggesting that the public school spirit of jolly pranks and Billy Bunterisms that underlay the Imperial Raj, still permeates current English usage in India.
I experienced several vestiges of the Raj: barefoot boys playing cricket on fields of dry mud, the necessity of afternoon tea, the pucka dress and traditions of Indian military personnel in contrast to the dirt and poverty around, the fact that you would shout at the gate for the driver who would come bounding out of his hut, convey you and wait for you while you swam in the warm ocean or did your errands. The most soulful relic of that fated Empire was Ross Island, a half hour ferry journey from Port Blair, capital of the Andaman Islands. The island was the British administrative centre of this part of the Bay of Bengal from the early 19th century until 1943 when it was seized by the Japanese. The British never returned there and a small town with its churches and bakery, its post office and messes, its tennis courts and residences, filling the whole island, is now a series of ghostly ruins amidst tropical vegetation. Coconut palms and parasitic figs have sprouted everywhere. The climate is salubrious: there is always a slight breeze and no malarial mosquitoes. In the centre of the island is the cemetery, Victorian slabs and crosses crumblingly recording the early deaths of young soldiers or sailors from Devon or Huddersfield or Falkirk.
The flight from Chennai to Port Blair left at 05.30 on my fifth day in India. You are soon over the great expanses of the Indian Ocean, heading into banks of dawn-flushed clouds, flying into the full face of dawn. Two hours later the small jet comes in sight of the islands, a long archipelago loosely linking the mouth of the Irrawaddy Delta in Burma to the northernmost tip of Sumatra. From the air they seemed quiet, dappled with sun and shadow, vividly green (it was the monsoon season) and well-watered. The landing at Port Blair was sudden and onto a short runway ending in the upward slope of a hill. The terminal was a glorified hut.
The twelve days that followed were intensive and focused. Although hot and moist and with occasional heavy showers, the climate was more comfortable than that of Chennai. The twenty eight or so priests that attended the retreat were predominantly young; half were Pilar fathers; there were a few Jesuits, two Salesians and eight diocesans. The eight days were followed immediately by an intensive two day seminar for all the priests and religious of the diocese, a group numbering over seventy. Several had made difficult journeys of 24 hours or more: travel in these parts is not simple.
Many of the inhabitants of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands come from the various states of India, so the population is mixed. In the more remote parts are indigenous tribes who have had little contact with outsiders and whom the Indian government wish to preserve from outside influence, including missionary activity. Those of the Andamans are ethnically negroid and those of the Nicobars similar to the Burmese. Because of the difficulties of travelling, the priests can come together only once a year for a period of about two weeks when they have their retreat, seminar and various meetings. During that time the parishes have no Sunday mass: instead there are services organised by the laity. Although generally in groups of two, the priests are isolated. One young priest, ordained only a year, lives with one other in the parish at the bottom of the Nicobar Islands, the southernmost parish of all India. Much closer to the equator, it has a hotter and less healthy climate. Malaria and other diseases are prevalent there and foreigners are not allowed to visit. "I have been there three months," the priest told me, "and so far have been healthy, but many cannot survive in the climate." The distance from his parish to Port Blair is approaching 600 km as the crow flies, roughly the distance from London to Perth in Scotland. But the journey from London to Perth is a stroll round the garden in comparison.
The physical difficulties of the situation are not helped by a government attitude that is at best inconsistent: some individual officials may be helpful, but others are officious and negative. India is a vast land and occasional acts of persecution are newsworthy, and therefore not everyday occurrences. But during my three weeks in the country, one priest had been recently murdered, a sister in Bihar was abducted, stripped and made to drink urine by Hindu fundamentalists, and there was a ripple of threats relating to the impending visit of the Pope later this year.
On the day before my arrival in the Andamans, a man had been arrested in Port Blair by the police. During the night at the police station he died in mysterious circumstances. When his family arrived next day, the police were initially evasive, then claimed that he had hanged himself with his own lungi. Crowds gradually gathered menacingly in the centre of the town, confronting the police. Shops were closed and the bumpy, windowless buses that ply the roads of India were cancelled. The tension endured for some days, the crowd, in an ugly and hostile mood, demanding that an independent autopsy be held. The Andamans are the remotest frontier of India, and there is a military presence here. There tasks include warding off illegal Burmese fishing boats.
The priests and sisters of these islands are impressive: they are direct and dedicated. Of course they are aware of the dangers and difficulties, but there is a faith and commitment and a joy which suggests that they are dealing with things that really matter. During the seminar I divided them into ten groups each of which had to prepare and deliver a 10 minute "talk" on prayer to a different audience: one group had to imagine it was dealing with a class of 20 six year olds, another with a group of interested Hindu adults, another with a group of uneducated low caste villagers. I was amazed by the imagination, energy, inventiveness and sheer ability to communicate. The bishop is fortunate indeed to have such a gifted group of co-workers.
Despite the work load and the showers, I managed on several days to go for a swim to a cove a mile or two away from the bishop's house. The driver would take me on the bumpy road, past glossy water buffaloes wallowing in even the smallest puddle, past roadside stalls and naked children, past placid cows and yapping dogs and endless crowds of people. The cove itself was just as you might imagine: a broad, gently curving arc of golden sand, at either end rocky cliffs crowned with lush vegetation, and behind hosts of the ubiquitous coconut palms. There were few people there at four in the afternoon, with the sun already beginning to descend and a pale crescent of moon high in the east. I would walk round an occasional cow on the sand chewing sacredly, and enter the Bay of Bengal, dark and warm, to float gently on my back with the tranquil swell, looking up into the pale blue sky.
My hosts were surprised when I declared that I was happy to eat any food they prepared. I was able to sample a range of the piquant, spicy and delicious: small stumpy bananas and luscious papayas from the garden, the soft slimy white flesh of a young coconut cut down thirty seconds before, the crisp sensation of lightly fried kari leaves, fishes hitherto unknown, roasted or baked, colourful, powerful sauces, sharp or rich or overwhelming, mango pickles rendering everything else pale and bland.
India cannot be described as pale and bland. Here, I was the odd man out in a sea of dark faces. I had the salutary experience of causing a baby to cry with fear: it had probably never seen a white face before. On my last night in the Andamans I sat out with the Pilar fathers to which congregation the bishop also belongs, drinking Goan cashew schnapps and hearing their songs. The fellowship was close and joyful; soon they would be scattering again to their remote parishes. Overhead the stars were bright and strange.
I returned to Chennai for two days before leaving India. The city has had Christians for two thousand years. St Thomas the apostle is reputed to have preached and been martyred here. The site of his martyrdom is a holy place and his body is enshrined in the cathedral of Mylapore. I attended a mass in Tamil on St Thomas's Mount, celebrated by a Tamil cardinal visiting from Rome. From this mount you can gaze across the great expanse of Chennai and on the nearby airport where the jets come in below you. I arrived at the airport at 05.00 on my last morning, to pass the elaborate security checks through which one leaves this other world of India, to emerge, six hours later by clock, ten hours in reality, in pale autumnal London.
IndexBishop Austin O'Neill OSB 1841 - 1911 by Abbot Geoffrey Scott OSB
On Sabbatical in Dublin by Fr Finbar Kealy OSB