Kerala

   I'm writing this from New Delhi as I wait for a driver to take us to the airport for our trip to Varanasi. This is really the first time in 2 ½ weeks that I've had a chance to sort out my thoughts about the trip. It's been extraordinary, though very different from my first trip here. That one was organized around an intellectual kind of journey which, at the time, I thought sometimes distracted from my seeing India in all of its variety, but looking back I really value the intellectual exploration it facilitated. This trip has been a more conventional “tourist” trip to India, although I don't seem capable of letting go of my critical//anthropological eye when I travel (when one traffics in cultural studies as a profession it's nearly impossible to visit other cultures without having that framework shape the experience—that, and the camera, which helps me to see everything in a more detailed and intense way). The intellectual core of this trip for me so far has been our exploration of Hindu culture in South India, especially as it is manifested in the historical development of the temple. These are fascinating architectural, devotional, and social spaces, and it has been interesting to take both a historical and cultural tour of their development and character. The tour was organized nicely to facilitate a historical experience of the development of these temples, starting with the carved spaces and forms in Mahabalapurum and then moving on to the built temple structures in Thanjuvar, Madurai, and Kerala. In Mahabalapurum we explored devotional spaces carved into stone, the first attempt at creating temple spaces in the south, and the extraordinary rock carvings of life-size elephants and chariots there. The shore temple, nearby on a bluff above the sea, was apparently the first attempt at actually building a temple out of stone, and this was the precursor to the larger temples we saw later in Thanjuvar and Madurai. The towers become colossal and grander in their increasingly baroque decoration, and the social space becomes more sweeping. There is an increasing element of spectacle at each of these places, and their organization as both devotional and social spaces has caught my interest. Each is different in its own way. The Big Shiva temple at Thanjuvar is spread over acres, the statuary is unpainted, and the social spaces are outside and grand. The Meenkashi temple in Madurai, on the other hand, is a riot of color and consists of multiple towers (decorated with representational statuary depicting scenes from the Hindu holy books, the Ramayana and the Mahabarata), and a labyrinth of interior spaces where visitors thread through dark channeled arcades full of shops which then lead to devotional spaces, sanctuaries, etc., where long lines of people form by flickering candle light, some in traditional priestly, Brahmanic garb and others in sarees or middle class western clothes, a striking variety of people reflecting all of the facets of Indian culture, with a few tourists like us sprinkled in.

   The temples of Kerala are built in a completely different architectural style clearly influenced by Buddhist, Chinese, and Greek forms. No grand towers here, and very little if any representational decoration. The buildings are low lying with tile roofs that tip up at each end, like little canoes. They look vaguely Japanese, and in place of statuary on the surface of the buildings there are rows and rows of small cups that hold oil and wicks. They start at ground level and run in rows all of the way up to where the roof begins. In the evening and during festivals these lamps are lit so that the entire building, every side from ground to roof, is illuminated by the lamps. This architectural style is clearly a product of the trade routes in and around Cochin. Where the cultural influences determining the Tamil Nadu temples seem relatively fixed and uninfluenced by sources outside the Pallava and Chola empires, the temples of Kerala reflect the interesecting worlds characteristic of the trade flowing through Kerala form the east, the west, and the south, the result of early forms of what we now call globalization. These are soothing, calm, meditative spaces, although when they are filled with a rush of pilgrims they become intense -- crowded, ecstatic, exploding in fervor and flowing with energy.

   The other cultural form we explored in Kerala was the ancient tradition of dance theater, which I briefly wrote about in a couple of my blog posts. I first heard about these in Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things, which has moving scene in which Kathakali dancers who felt guilty about performing a truncated versions of a temple dance for tourists at a hotel perform the entire dance in a temple. I mentioned this scene to a staff member at one of the dance institutes we visited and she told me that even this nostalgia was now gone, that the dances have been so thoroughly absorbed into the tourist culture that very few people feel the kind of guilt about performing them reflected in Roy's novel. Of course there's another paradox here, for while one might argue the tourist versions of these dances represent a kind of desecration of what were originally temple dances, the institutions that sustain these dances for tourists are helping to keep them alive.

   Once our tour ended and most of the group went home Lynn, Darren, Ross and I had a wonderful stay with Tripthi Pillai's family in Kerala. They have a number of homes outside of Kottayam, a small city just off Lake Vembanad, behind the sea. I wrote a brief post about this visit earlier and couldn't possible do justice to describing it right now.