India is a country of many styles, from the satellite cities of Delhi to the sprawl of Mumbai and the serene Malabar coast.
FRANK MCDONALDis intrigued by a place looking forward, that is also defined by its history
AT NARIMAN POINT, near the end of the great sweeping crescent of Marine Drive in Mumbai, three elderly men – one of them with hair dyed with henna – were kneeling on their prayer mats facing towards Mecca as the sun was about to set over the Arabian Sea.
It was my last night in India after nearly three weeks travelling, mainly along the coast of Kerala, and I was sitting on the promenade as Sunday strollers – old and young, even extended families – walked along without a care in the world. It was a long way from Ireland.
A street urchin who couldn’t have been more than 10 years old came along, selling maps of India in colourful folders. And I needed a map, if only to show how little of the sub-continent I had actually covered.
“How much?” I asked.
“Two hundred rupees,” he replied. Though this was the equivalent of €3.20, I had dealt with enough tiresome touts in India to know that you simply have to say: “That’s very expensive.” He looked slightly hurt, and shot back a brilliant retort: “It’s a big country.”
I laughed, gave him the 200 rupees, and folded out the map to see where I had been, in the context of the whole. It was a revelation. Sure, I had started in Delhi and ended in Mumbai, but the distance I covered by land in Kerala, on the southwest coast, was insignificant.
Just two lines of latitude, from eight degrees north in Trivandrum to 10 in Cochin. To put that in perspective, the longest train journey in India, between Jammu in the Himalayas and Trivandrum, near its southern tip, lasts 89 hours – including stops. That’s nearly four days!
I wanted to see Delhi first, not least because my niece Nessa lives there, working for the Danish shipping line Maersk as head of customer relations for South Asia. With a penthouse apartment in Gurgaon, an exploding new town on the outskirts of Delhi, how could I resist?
She brought me to some of the best restaurants, such as Cilantro in the cool, white Trident Hotel, inspired by Mughal architecture, and Varq, in the trendy Taj Hotel, Mansing, where the mouth-watering dégustation menu was as expensive as anything in pre-recession Dublin.
We also ate really well at Trishna, in the historic heart of Mumbai, where the freshest fish is served up to the city’s cognoscenti in a crowded, kitschly decorated room. Coincidentally, Trevor White, main author of Dubliner magazine’s restaurant guide, was also dining there.
Not far away, overlooking the Gateway of India, is the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which was bombed last November. Signs on its boarded-up ground floor say they’re working to restore this “enduring symbol of Mumbai’s spirit and dignity” (apart from its hideous 30-storey tower).
I was disappointed by Delhi. Sure, it has great set-pieces from the Mughal period, particularly the Red Fort and Jama Masjid mosque, both built by Shah Jahan, and Humayun’s Tomb, forerunner of the Taj Mahal, where the gardens are being renovated by the Aga Khan Foundation.
But the vast, sprawling city’s public realm is littered with filth and all of its arteries are choked by traffic. It is, in fact, an anti-city. Nothing built since Lutyens was around addresses its big wide roads; villas and apartment blocks are all surrounded by walls, railings and gates.
The Rajpath, India Gate and Rashtrapati Bhavan (former vice-regal palace) are Lutyens’ great legacies. But his planning of New Delhi was clearly an antidote to the congested, insanitary Old Delhi, with its tight streets full of hawkers, tourists, rickshaws and trailing electrical wires.
The contrast between the chaos at ground level in Chawri Bazaar and the metro station beneath it is like the difference between the Middle Ages and the 21st century. Down the escalators, it’s another world, served by sleek subway trains of the new metro – Delhi’s pride and joy.
Men and women must go through separate queues to be frisked for security, and the stations are rather grey, but fares are cheap – only six rupees to travel two stops to Connaught Place (Rajiv Chowk); that’s where 10 people were injured by dustbin bombs last September.
The massive metro construction programme is due to be finished for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. In the southern suburbs, elevated trackbeds are being installed in the middle of main roads on huge concrete columns, like a poor man’s version of the Temple of Karnak.
Delhi is softened by its greenery. There are trees everywhere and lots of saplings planted by the municipality, even in the midst of squalor. Public parks, such as the Lodhi Gardens with its magnificent tombs, are nearly as well maintained as the manicured lawns of luxury hotels.
The same can be said of Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala. Its Napier Museum, a riot of Indo-Saracenic architecture, is located in a fine public park laid out at the height of the British Raj. The palace of the Maharaja of Travancore, with its exquisite wood carvings, is also open to visitors.
A tiered Hindu temple, with elaborate stone carvings at every level, dominates the surrounding landscape. Unfortunately off limits to non-believers, I saw a young white woman wearing a silk veil in the classic yoga position facing towards it and smiling as she meditated intently.
Kerala bills itself as “God’s own country”, and in many ways it must be. According to legend, St Thomas – “Doubting Thomas” – landed on the Malabar coast in AD 52 and built the first Christian churches in India before being stabbed to death a few years later by jealous Hindus.
Though more than half the state’s population of 32 million is Hindu, Muslims and Christians account for almost a quarter each, with much smaller communities of Buddhists, Jainists, Jews and Sikhs. It’s also unique in having freely elected communist governments since 1957.
One suspects that Roy Kuncheria, a retired colonel from one of the Indian army’s Gurkha regiments, would not approve. A Syrian Orthodox Christian, he runs the excellent Varikatt heritage home BB near the Secretariat building in Trivandrum – another fine legacy of the Raj.
The charming traditional bungalow was built around 1860 by a Miss Blanket, who had fallen in love with an English “Sahib” tea-planter and followed him to Kerala. Right next door is the small, modern St Peter’s Syrian Orthodox (Simhasana) cathedral, with its pointed belltower.
Most of Kerala’s Christians are Catholics – a legacy of Portugal’s conquest of the Malabar coast in the early 16th century. This was led by Vasco da Gama, whom we would regard as a great navigator, even a European hero. But the truth is that he behaved with barbarity.
In 1502, when Calicut refused to yield to him, da Gama’s brigands captured and killed more than 100 sailors in the harbour, cutting off their ears, noses, fingers and toes, and then sent a grisly pile to the local ruler, who was so appalled by this savagery that he surrendered.
The so-called Indo-Portuguese Museum in Fort Cochin is silent about the conquest; it is merely a collection of religious artefacts from later periods. And the nearby research centre named after Vasco da Gama is merely that; it has nothing to do with researching his record in India. asked a helpful church warden in the Santa Cruz basilica, with its gaudy murals, if he realised that da Gama was a Christian savage. “No, no,” he said. Meanwhile, the Portuguese navigator’s tomb occupies an honoured position in the Jeronimus monastery in Bélem, near Lisbon.
Cochin has a Jewish synagogue dating from 1745, although (again according to legend) it is said that Jewish merchants landed on the Malabar coast in the first century AD, after the fall of Jerusalem. The town is full of tourists and touts trying to sell all sorts of trinkets.
Cochin is also famous for its Chinese nets – enormous wooden contraptions that local fishermen use to dredge fish from the harbour. Right alongside are tented stalls – “You Buy, We Cook” – with an amazing selection of fish that can be grilled, boiled, roasted or fried.
To get away from it all, a houseboat trip on the Kuttanad backwaters is a must, because this is Kerala as it can’t be seen from a bus, car or train. The vast lake is 75km long, a broad expanse of murky water, but the relatively narrow channels that feed into it are more interesting.
Lush tropical vegetation of palm, coconut and banana trees fringe these waterways, interspersed with simple houses, traditional villages and sights such as women washing clothes, men shimmying up tree trunks to get the coconuts and others fishing from dugout canoes.
Then there’s the Raheem Residency, behind the beach in Alleppey, run by former RTÉ chat show host Bibi Baskin – “Madam Bibi” to her staff. A large bungalow laid out around two courtyards, one of which features a curvy French-made swimming pool, it’s the veritable lap of luxury. Furnished with antiques, including four-poster beds so high that you need a step to get up on to them, Raheem offers excellent cuisine in its rooftop Chakra restaurant. Dinner is cheap at 690 rupees (€10.60), but you pay dearly even for Indian wine, because it’s so heavily taxed.
Bizarrely, the Old Harbour Hotel, one of the upmarket places to stay in Cochin, doesn’t have a licence. So Vinu, my Indian guide, took me by auto-rickshaw to Bevco, the state liquor monopoly, where I bought some very good Sula Chenin Blanc for just 500 rupees per bottle.
There’s no problem about getting wine or beer in any of the restaurants in the beach resort of Varkala, where red cliffs surround a crescent of golden sand facing west towards the Arabian Sea. It is, or rather could be, an idyllic place for a holiday except for the rubbish.
Owners of shack-like shops along the cliff path spoil it by dumping detritus over the edge, clogging the ravines. An English tourist remarked that “they just don’t see it”, while an Indian said: “What characterises this country is personal cleanliness and communal squalor.”
It was not far from Varkala that I saw the extraordinary spectacle of a Hindu temple festival, a colourful, noisy procession of vigorous drummers, women in saris, smiling boys wearing make-up, men dressed as gods and caparisoned elephants bringing up the rear.
Along the route, families had set up little altars outside their houses, with candles and fruit offerings for the Hindu gods. It was reminiscent of the Corpus Christi processions we used to have in Dublin, but much less solemn. And I was the only foreign national present to witness it.
Many Indians bob their heads as they talk to you, smiling all the time in such a charming way. It is extraordinary that so few of them smoke; during my brief visit, I saw just two men smoking cigarettes. Clearly, Phillip Morris and Marlboro Man have failed in their mission.
I kept returning to the colonial legacy, talking to Christians who are living embodiments of it. The country might have become an exotic adjunct of the Portuguese, Dutch or even French empires, all of which left their mark. But it was the British Raj that endured, in the railways, language and administration.
India was fortunate to have been colonised by the British, rather than anyone else. Bombay (Mumbai) was the last garrison handed over to the new Indian army in 1947, and then the British troops marched out through the Gateway of India carrying home their own memories of the Raj.