Off to India

I’m setting off again, and I’m restarting this blog. It’s been silent for awhile, mainly because I find it a hassle to write for something that doesn’t pay every day. But I got my start in the travel writing business by sending accounts of my journey to all my friends, and keeping my fingers tapping while I travel is good exercise.

Besides, I’ve found writing for Lonely Planet can put you face to face with what a lonely planet it can sometimes be. I hope you readers comment often – I need to feel connected to things while I’m on the road. The isolation can be maddening. 

I’m heading for India, and specifically Tamil Nadu and the Andaman Islands. The former is the heartland of South India, and with the exception of some bleary beach memories from Goa, was my favorite part of the country when I trekked over the sub-continent four years ago. The homeland of the Tamils is the core of Dravidian culture, one of the oldest extant societies in human history. It’s a green land of rice paddies and smooth boulders, coconut groves and water, enclosed by the foothills and slopes of the Western Ghats, where pyramid temples and stone cities grow like mushrooms, and the unceasing green is broken by flashes of purple saris bent over in the fields, the blue smoke of rickshaws and the staggering tinny screech of Kollywood songs – Tamil Nadu’s homegrown film industry. 

There’s plenty of places that travel writers describe as a window unto the past, but Tamil Nadu embodies this cliché to the exclusion of most places on Earth. You can go to Greece and see temples to Zeus, but no one is sacrificing goats at the foot of Mt. Olympus these days. I Tamil Nadu, the goats are still sacrificed to the same Gods that reigned during the period of classical Hellenism, and the prayers, songs and chants are passed down in a modified, but essentially unbroken chain. This sort of cultural continuity can be found in other parts of the world, but generally it is among isolated tribal societies. In Tamil Nadu, the dialogue with the past is not only fresh and engaged in on a daily basis, but conducted under the auspices of a modernizing India, an economic Tiger that draws much of its strength from the education-oriented, supremely hardworking Tamils. Even in China, where the split between the old ways and the new is delineated by the rural/urban divide, I don’t believe you can find this degree of history and the modern world engaged in a constant balancing act. The entire gestalt of the above creates a thrilling tension that has stayed with me for four years.

As a dedicated Southeast Asia traveler I also look to this region the way a Western intellectual historian would to ancient Greece. The kingdoms of the Cholas spread their aesthetic, political philosophies, literature and writing to Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, even Vietnam, the sculpted stone smile of a Vishnu from Mamallapuram reflecting the Mona Lisa smirk of an enlightened Buddha in Bagan. When the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore visited Indonesia he said, “I see India all about me, and yet I recognize nothing.” I want to learn to recognize these links between two parts of the world I very much love, to continue a process of connecting the countries and cultures of the Indian Ocean in my mind with my feet and my words. 

I know little of the Andamans. They were called Kala Pani, the black waters, for their role as a penal settlement during the days of the British Raj. They are inhabited by the Sentinelese, one of the last first contact civilizations on the planet. On old European maps they are inhabited by men with faces in their chests, men with dogs for heads and ears that stretch down to their feet. A year ago I wondered if Lonely Planet would every send me outside of America; now I’m going as far from America’s embrace as I can imagine.

The Andamans were also the epicenter of the 2004 tsunami, which destroyed many of the communities in the area I will be covering. With that knowledge in mind I feel some kind of responsibility to this region, to report what has happened to it and how it has recovered and what it can offer the curious world. 

I’m taking a lot of reading material with me, as I always do; books are friends when the latter aren’t around, but I’m going to try and be gregarious and social, both for professional and personal reasons. I want to access the world again, to feel it flowing through me. Some of the accompanying books include:

*Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God, by Jonah Blank

*Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon

*Hindu Art, by T. Richard Burton

*The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction

*Poems of Love and War, from the Eight Anthologies and Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil

My next post will be from somewhere in the great Southlands, as soon as I recover from getting off at a 3am-arrival time in Chennai. Until then, I’ll see you all from the hawk’s eye view of the air.

 

 

Comments

[Rakesh Khanna]

Hi Adam,

A friend pointed me to your blog because you mention the book I edited, The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. Nice piece! If you're going to be in a Chennai for a few days, drop a line, we've got some fun book/art events going on we'd like to invite you to.

-Rakesh Khanna

[Madurai Hotels, Pollachi Hotels]

nice posting