Spring, Heat, Rains – A South Indian Diary - Hardcover

Shulman, D

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226755762 ISBN 13: 9780226755762

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Synopsis

Rocks. Goats. Dry shrubs. Buffaloes. Thorns. A fallen tamarind tree. Such were the sights that greeted David Shulman on his arrival in Andhra Pradesh in the spring of 2006. An expert on South Indian languages and cultures, Shulman knew the region well, but from the moment he arrived for this seven-month sojourn he actively soaked up such simple aspects of his surroundings, determined to attend to the rich texture of daily life - choosing to be at the same time scholar and tourist, wanderer and wonderer.Lyrical, sensual, and introspective, "Spring, Heat, Rains" is Shulman's diary of that experience. Evocative reflections on daily events - from explorations of crumbling temples to battles with ineradicable bugs to joyous dinners with friends - are organically interwoven with considerations of the ancient poetry and myths that remain such an inextricable part of life in contemporary India. With Shulman as our guide, we meet singers and poets, washermen and betel-nut vendors, modern literati and ancient gods and goddesses.We marvel at the 'golden electrocution' that is the taste of a mango fresh from the tree. And we plunge into the searing heat of an Indian summer, so oppressive and inescapable that when the monsoon arrives to banish the heat with sheets of rain, we understand why, year after year, it is celebrated as a miracle. An unabashedly personal account from a scholar whose deep knowledge has never obscured his joy in discovery, "Spring, Heat, Rains" is a passionate act of sharing, an unforgettable gift for anyone who has ever dreamed of India.

About this title

About the Author

David Shulman is the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of several books, including Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine and The Hungry God: Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

SPRING, HEAT, RAINS

A South Indian DiaryBy David Shulman

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-75576-2

Contents

Preface.......................................................ixAcknowledgments...............................................xvSpring........................................................1Heat..........................................................67Rains.........................................................115Appendix: Nala and the Naishadhiya-carita.....................213Selected Dramatis Personae....................................217Notes.........................................................219Glossary......................................................223Bibliography..................................................233

Chapter One

VASANTA, SPRING

February 5, 2006: East Coast Express

Rocks. Goats. Dry shrubs. Buffaloes. Thorns. A fallen tamarind tree. Tents. Red bricks in heaps. White graves, flashes in a brown-yellow universe. A motorbike on an earthen path. An auto rickshaw, yellow and black. Palm trees. Bicycles. Orange saris. A white flower in her hair. Eyes.

Mahbubabad. The morning ride across Telangana, the high plateau east of Hyderabad, seems synchronized with my need for a slow reentry. "Time" again presents itself as a question: does it exist, all of it, all past-future, as a dusty, viscous elastic casing for the mind, twisted into the mind? Each of us gets to see a small segment buried in one of the twists. For example, I have been offered the second half of the so-called twentieth century-an arbitrary boundary, after all-and on for some ways into the twenty-first. One could also run the segment backward. There is even knowledge, however uncertain, of the part that supposedly lies ahead. In fact, one can see it from the train window. Yellow and brown, flashes of white, a grave.

Nampalli station in central Hyderabad was chaotic, and no one could tell me what platform to look for. I fought my way with heavy bags, and the inevitable clumsy bottle of mineral water, up the steps and over the bridge through a vast crowd of disembarking passengers. On the coach, miraculously, pasted beside the window: David Dean Sul, age 57, berth 38.

It is early February, I am back in India. As always, being free, utterly free, feels oppressive, even sad. I can barely speak. Language is stuck in some recess of my mind, mostly inaccessible, a congealed form of forgetting, or of resistance. There is the huge effort ahead.

Slowly the landscape changes. Winter rice. Green shoots. More black rocks. The endless sky. Herons wade gingerly in a shallow pond. White over gray-blue. Lotus pads. Thorns. Boulders. Threshers. Winnowers. Brown haystacks. A river, clinging to existence. A bridge. A ridge. Two women sit, sifting grain in the sun, on the parallel track. A huge yellow sign reads Papatapalli. A boy, naked but for his shirt. The wind in the grass. Five more buffaloes. Thatched, round huts in the field. A serrated line of distant hills, orange-red as they come closer. The subtle taste of happiness. To celebrate, I take out the Naishadhiya, to make a beginning. I will be living for these months with, or maybe in, this book, Sriharsha's Sanskrit masterpiece on the life of Nala, an Indian Everyman (nara). Nala is chosen by the beautiful Damayanti, only to abandon her as he wanders, transformed into an alien self. Like Nala, I am, perhaps, disguised, or lost; but I am heading, maybe backward, to some known home.

Rajahmundry, Anand Regency Hotel

8:45 PM

The first sight of the town, as we cross the vast bridge into East Godavari district, is only partly astonishing: a jumble of uneven houses, fading pastels, grime-laced facades, alleys, spilling up from the riverbank. It is the magic hour when the light turns molten. Dust and gold. Of course it is the river itself that takes away one's breath; probably the river, this wide sluggish sweep of brown and green, is the real Rajahmundry, the buildings and streets no more than an appendage. Arrival is the usual flurry, the usual question-why am I here, of all possible "heres"? The rickshaw drivers outside the station, well aware of their advantage, extort the ridiculous fee of fifty rupees to the hotel. I clamber in, suddenly exhausted, quizzical, a little raw. I remember these streets from the last time, in 2000, when I came to the Gautami Library, one of the major collections in Andhra Pradesh, in search of a rare Telugu book. I was lucky that time: hidden in the Gautami's dusty shelves amid other rare, nineteenth-century editions was the arcane text I needed. And a few weeks before, there was a weekend here with Eileen and Edan at the Mahalakshmi Hotel, on the riverbank, smothered in the stench of the Andhra Pradesh Paper Mills upstream.

I check in to the Anand Regency. Six years ago it was polished, slick, and new; proud to be "the only star hotel" in Rajahmundry. The new millennium had brought this self-conscious fragment of the outside world to the city of Nannayya, the first Telugu poet. A turbaned doorman in white and green still stands at the entrance. But six years have taken their toll, or perhaps it is only the clammy air of the delta; in any case, the polish is largely gone, though the pretense is still in place. I unpack and peer out the window at the white roofs of Danavayipeta as the sun sets, a pale red halo traced through the dust. The roof closest to me has a vast carpet of red chilies that have been set out to dry.

Before dark there is time for my first walk. But why here? It is hard to shake the strange sense of an arbitrary fate, or was it merely a romantic choice that came out of a fantasy of poets and scholars on the bank of the Godavari? The dense stacked alleys remind me of Bashir Bagh, where I lived (happily) in Hyderabad in 1998-99. It is hot and sticky and I am deeply alone, even alone to myself, lost, murky, unstuck.

Dinner at the hotel brings some new friends. A tall, contemplative waiter named Sharif says he reads philosophy every afternoon in the Gautami Library. What is my philosophy? I tell him it is too early to say. I am fifty-seven years old, struggling with simple Telugu sentences. Give me some time, I say, I will come back and we will discuss the great questions. Bitter-gourd curry, kakara-kaya, my favorite, picks up my spirits; or perhaps it is the subtle, only partly conscious sense of coming to rest. I have been telling my friends in Israel, who ask me what I am planning on doing in Rajahmundry for seven months, that I need to reinvent myself. Last week Yair reminded me that when, some years ago, before my last long trip, he asked me what I was planning to do in India, I answered that one should never go to India with a plan.

February 6

Is it possible that I came to India only five days ago? Opening this page, I record the date and suddenly cannot remember the year. Each hour has its specific gravity, its physical intensity. My eyes, my hands, my ears, my memory: all are furiously at work. I try to think it through: by now, it seems to me, it must be at least 2008. Some shred of the Mediterranean world surfaces; no, it is, at least in theory, somewhere, elsewhere, still 2006.

First things first. I want to see the town, the Godavari River, the revus or ghats on the riverbank leading down to the water. The morning is cool, gray-green-white. I take an auto rickshaw to Pushkaraa Revu, walk along the river, watch the pilgrims climb down the stone steps to bathe, watch the Godavari receive them with gentle attentiveness, a liquid caress, as a regal goddess should. I revisit the Mahalakshmi Hotel-now strikingly reborn, almost glowing under a new management. They take me to meet the manager, Ravisundar, who, like most people I encounter, wants to know all about the Jewish god, before all else. I try to explain. He is, I say, nirguna-without qualities, without form; in other words, a philosophical abstraction. This is about as close as I can get. The word, vaguely philosophical in Telugu or Sanskrit, means something to Ravisundar, who nonetheless appears skeptical. With the river, a living goddess, at once beneficent and capricious, flowing outside his office, he probably thinks that only a madman would bother to worship an abstraction. In fact, I completely agree. This theological excursus now concluded, Ravisundar offers to let me stay at the hotel at a reasonable rate for all these coming months. It seems possible to me, one conceivable solution, and of course there is the ravishing river always visible from the window; but first I will look for a flat somewhere in town.

In mild ecstasy, I walk uphill at Kotagummam, the old "passage into the fort" leading away from the riverbank, toward town. Nothing is left of the fort, or of the passage, but Rajahmundry tradition thinks that all the great medieval kings, Rajarajanarendra and his many successors, sat in state right here. Near the tacky white statue of Siva-Dakshinamurti, the god in meditation, which occasionally has water-the Ganges-pouring through his hair, I turn into the small streets off the main pedestrian thoroughfare. I am roaming, fancy free. There is a cramped, densely stacked bookstore, I go in for a quick look; the old Kasi-majjili stories, hair-raising tales of pilgrims to Benares in centuries past, have come out in a new, many-volume edition. When I have a flat, I'll come back to buy them. The owner, somewhat taken aback by the strange apparition that has descended upon him this morning-a Telugu-reading, Telugu-speaking white man-asks me in Telugu what place is my home. I don't hesitate: "Rajahmundry!"

February 7

My body seems to be seeking a new rhythm; I wake at five thirty, sleep again, dream of the toothache that tormented me before coming here, a lover who is concerned that I have to face it alone.

Heavy, I wake, wash, perform the morning ritual: a few minutes on the roof, taking in the city from this high vantage point, shortly after sunrise. The rooftops, white, gray, streaked with grime, partly hidden by the thick green clusters of palm, seem to be humming a barely audible morning raga. Birdcalls, the bells on the bicycles, the constant backdrop of horns from the cars and rickshaws, the cries of the fruit vendors, the distant ring of a radio broadcasting a Sanskrit prayer to the waking god, mothers shouting at their children: all this is the raga as it breaks through the surface to audibility. Fragments held by an unfamiliar murcchana scale, rising, descending, binding these pieces together into something whole, with a few uncanny musical embellishments, alankaras, added for good measure.

I call Smile, Narayana Rao's good friend; Narayana Rao has given me the number and told me to make the contact. I introduce myself, awkwardly, in my halting, bookish Telugu, which Smile naturally doesn't understand; suddenly he remembers: Narayana Rao has prepared him for my arrival. "I'm coming to your hotel now," he says. By eleven he is with me, a jocular, energized presence, a balding bon vivant, and every inch a poet. He speaks of Eluru and his student days, when Narayana Rao was his teacher at Eluru College-a young, charismatic, visionary teacher-and of other friends (the beloved Penmetsa Suryanarayana Raju), now gone. Smile 's Telugu gives no quarter: it explodes into space like a geyser, and at this early moment I understand only some of it, marveling at the speed and richness. He is warm, welcoming, full of plans, excited. We will go, he says, to Daksharama, Bikkavolu, Amaravati, Guntur, the famous sites of the delta within easy reach of Rajahmundry.

Hints of possible flats are filtering in. Anand, my good friend from Tirupati Gangamma days (1992-93), is now in Rajahmundry with a Yale project on AIDS in the Godavari Delta. He and his office manager, Satish, are starting to search for me. In the afternoon they take me to see two possible choices. The first, on Anam Venkatappa Rao Road, is in a large pink-orange complex, very reminiscent of our Vizag days six years ago. The apartment is clean, spacious, and characterless, and I can see at once that I don't want it. The second is a smaller place in a house on the edge of town, opening up to cashew groves and fields, rather isolated, as in a village. I like it.

After dark, Smile returns with Patanjali Sastry and Endluri Sudhakar. Patanjali Sastry-ravishing name-has a trim gray beard, a soft manner, dignified self-possession, deep eyes; he is a writer of short stories, a famous environmental activist, a cultivated man of letters; also the grandson of Talavajjhala Sivasankara Sastry, one of the luminaries of early twentieth-century Andhra, translator into Telugu of the Buddhist Jatakas and the Sanskrit Ocean of Story, composer of Telugu operas. The family proudly traces its lineage to Talavajjhala Narayana Tirtha, the famous eighteenth-century author of Srikrishna-lila-tarangini, a dance-drama sung entirely in Sanskrit. Narayana Tirtha traveled south from Andhra to the Tamil country, to a place called Varahur or Bhupatirajapuram; his tomb, or samadhi, is at Tiruppunturutti on the banks of the Kaveri, still a popular site of pilgrimage. Sanskrit and Telugu erudition were Patanjali Sastry's birthright, but he is also a Renaissance man, fully at home in European cultures-one of those Godavari Brahmins for whom the world has no boundaries, and nothing human is alien.

Sudhakar has brought two volumes of his poetry, one of them a beautiful bilingual edition; a well-known Dalit poet, he is a lecturer at the branch of Telugu University in Bommur. Full of vigor, with a forceful, lucid way of speaking. Hours pass in literary conversation, smoothed along by rather a lot of beer. I recite the opening to the Song of Songs in Hebrew and translate, certain that I am flattening out the magical words. Richness ebbs ands flows around me, too much for me, though I am eager, ready to learn, ready to plunge in. In the middle of it all Narayana Rao calls on my new cell phone. Language fails me; I manage only to say: "I'm happy."

I dream, oddly, of the Greek poem inscribed on the wall of the burial cave at Beit Guvrin, south of Jerusalem:

Nothing else remains that I can do for you, or that will pleasure you. I am sleeping with someone else, but it is you I love, dearest to me of all. In the name of Aphrodite, I am happy about one thing, that your cloak has been left to me as a pledge. But I flee, I permit you expanses of freedom. Do anything you desire, do not strike the wall, it only makes noise. We will motion to each other, this will be the sign between us.

A woman, apparently, speaks to her dead lover. I carry this poem with me in my wallet. Often, when I read it out loud, people refuse to believe it was written two thousand years ago. Amiel sent me the original last year; the translation is faithful, even the "expanses of freedom."

In the dream I insist that my eyes are not yet awake. This seems accurate enough, and widely applicable, an image of my life. Then I am in class, the last meeting of our seminar; the students leave, one by one, like in the Haydn Farewell Symphony-before I can sum up and say goodbye. Another precise metaphor.

The flat by the paddy fields has vanished; various insuperable technicalities preclude this choice. Instead, I will move into a flat directly under Patanjali Sastry's office, in Vadrevunagar. I like the address: Door Number 86-6-3/4. It's a beautiful street at the edge of town, close to the National Highway, far from the Old Quarter and the river, with the scent and colors of Mylapore in the heart of old Madras, the one fixed, enduring point in my inner map. Rajahmundry is full of new flats, it is truly no problem to find one; a wave of new building has swept over the city. Mine has a bedroom, a kitchen (with three dabs of red-brown paint in one corner, an indication that the goddess is present), a small sitting space next to the kitchen, a puja room with somewhat ragged stickers showing various gods and gurus, a narrow entrance porch fenced in by an iron grill (to keep out the monkeys?), two bathrooms-one Western style, one Indian-and a spare room for guests. There are bookshelves carved into the wall, with Hyderabadi arches and medallions nonchalantly crowning the top level. This is India: light traces of beauty are routine. Plain surfaces are uninteresting, almost inhuman. I will, of course, have to buy furniture, cooking utensils, sheets....

(Continues...)

Excerpted from SPRING, HEAT, RAINSby David Shulman Copyright © 2009 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226755762
• ISBN 13: 9780226755762
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208