The Memsahib of Ooty, A Passage to Kerala, part 2.

E.M Foster's Passage to India is not simply about the domination of the Raj, it is, more importantly, about human relationships. When Foster writes in his other famous novel, Howard's End,the words, 'only connect', he emphasises that it is the connections between human beings that matter most in his writing. As I sat on the Nilgili mountain railway with our suitcases shoved under my seat I felt a connection, with India and with my fellow passengers. We were thrown together for the slow haul up the mountain on a train that could have carried Miss Quested into the hills decades earlier and after five hours of extremely slow travel, stunning scenery and various stops, we were laughing and talking to each other in the relaxed manner of happy travellers as if we had been in each other's company for longer than a few hours. Since the train needed to have frequent stops to replenish the water tank we tumbled off onto platforms to take photographs, side-step friendly monkeys and on one occasion to drink masala tea and eat samosas served in old issues of The Deccan Chronicle.

The Engine

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One of the many water stops

The engine pushes rather than pulls the train

A well oiled machine

Getting ready to leave

 At Coonoor I shoved along my seat to allow an intrepid traveller called Cecilia to join us. She has come to India every year for twenty years and she knows regions that, to me, are still names on a map. Cecilia is an elegant, older, switched-on and delightful lady who was that week visiting her friends at an organic nursery near the race track in Ooty. Then, there were the Indian students in the next carriage who sang songs for us all as we climbed higher and higher up the mountain, their harmonising voices eventually disappearing into the steam that trailed behind the train. And finally in the front carriage sat a friendly Australian family whom we saw again in Mysore whizzing by, piled into an auto rickshaw.

A young couple on the Coonoor platform

The Cameronian future

Tea plantation seen from the train

Udagamandalam or Ooty was once a Raj hill station and we stayed in a Taj hotel that had long ago been a private school. Its grounds boasted rhodadendrons and hydrangeas that are familiar in Irish gardens. The hotel menu included memsahib dishes such as Dak Bungalow Chicken which I hope never ever to experience again as it is over cooked chicken in luke-warm gravy, boiled vegetables accompanied by tasteless rice. Sticking with Indian food was seriously more successful. In the hills, the temperature drops at night but when the dining room wood fire is lit and the honky tonk piano player bangs out old songs, I feel myself transported into the past of cool lawns, tea gardens, clubs, evening dances and the entertainments of a bygone time. For a moment I become the memsahib of Ooty.

Main building Taj Savoy Hotel, Ooty

Sunset over the Savoy

Tea Shop

Mysore Palace

The Sunday night illuminations are a social event

Now returned to England from my third trip to India, I look at my photographs and remember all the train travel, the porters who carry suitcases on their heads, crossing tracks to reach the other platform, the friendly young of Kerala who want to talk and practise their English, the jovial manager of a silk factory in Mysore and the workers in a sandalwood factory where the expensive perfume was so subtle I wanted to trap its unique scent for ever in a sandalwood box. India is chaotic but there is order within the chaos. There is a spirituality, of course, too, that in EM Foster's novel is personified in the character of Professor Godbole. And so, as winter continues here and I return to my writing, I look out on a landscape of bare trees that scratch steel-grey skies, recharged by the colours and energies of India and dream of connecting with this wonderful continent another day.      

A crepuscular Cochin

The Chinese nets at Fort Cochin

     

A Passage to Kerala- Episode One-Christmas to New Year

I have always been a fan of E.M Foster's novel A Passage To India. It encapsulates the tense atmosphere that can emerge from the meeting of two very different cultures when one culture conquers and as a consequence considers itself superior to the other.In Foster's novel this tension is presented in the central enigma of what happened in the caves at Marabar. It was a mysterious event owing much to a strange English woman's overactive imagination as she sought an authentic Indian experience. It almost destroyed the dashing Dr Assiz who misunderstood the Anglo-Indian. The novel preserves an intriguing atmosphere throughout. And, decades on, no matter how much India has been influenced by Western powers in the past, or how commercially and technically powerful this vast country is today, India retains a sense of mystery. This winter we visited India, beginning our trip in Bangalore, just before Christmas. Although A Passage to India is set near Calcutta, the movie was filmed close to the Nilgiri Hills.

Early morning in Bangalore

View in the Nilgiri Hills

The Busy Fruit and Veg Market in Mysore 

 On Christmas Eve we visited The Maharajah's Palace in Bangalore. This palace was built during the late eighteen hundreds when Queen Victoria was Empress of India and the architecture of the Raj influenced the building projects of wealthy Indian rulers who adapted an English vernacular in an Indian context. The palace in Bangalore imitates Windsor Castle and its state rooms are decorated in Gothic, Tudor and Art Nouveau styles. Within the English exterior the architecture accommodated Indian religious and social mores. For example, a screen allowed the Majarajah's wives to view proceedings in the state room whilst remaining hidden.

Bangalore Palace

Inside the Palace

Memories of a gilded past

In cities such as Bangalore bookshops are chaotic temples to literature and learning.These often straddle several floors where books are piled up in higglety piggelty fashion inviting relaxed exploration. There is a profound respect for education in India. I perused endless collections of European classics as well as many modern Indian writers, many of whom I had never known about, all for me, the lover of novels, a fascinating discovery. India's book palaces offer a beautiful mingling of cultures and, despite market place changes such as the e reader, book shops remain glorious glory holes of literature. Film, too, thrives here, both Indian and Western, Bollywood and Hollywood, and, at the moment, as in the West, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has opened to extravagant promotion.

Never one to refuse a free drink particularly if spiked with Hollywood hype

Inside Higginbotham's

Christmas Day in Bangalore was both an old fashioned and contemporary dining experience. As happens during Indian festivals, a complex flower pattern was created on the hallway floor leading to our hotel room. The hotel garden was exquisitely transformed for a very English Christmas brunch of turkey and trimmings accompanied by a live band. As we were meeting friends later that evening we opted to join them for Christmas dinner and dined out under the moon. Taj Hotels generally offer a sophisticated cuisine combining east and west in a pan-Indian experience, and The Taj West End in Bangalore is a calm haven in a busy and polluted city.

Dinner preparations underway,Tandoori ovens in background

And now we are in Kerala for New Year, right in the very south where warm breezes float in from the Indian Ocean and evenings promise magnificent sunsets. Around six o'clock in Varkala, Europeans and Indians flock onto the beach and amble along the cliff top walk where they watch an explosion of colour as the sun goes down. As we eat fresh fish barbecued with spices, there is a sense of magic. Where-ever we travel, whether the beach, cities such as Bangalore, Cochin or Mysore, the Nilgiri Railway to the hill station of Oooti or on Kumarakom Lake, an elusive quality haunts India, a mysterious essence that is as relevant today as it was in the bygone era of the Raj when E.M Foster wrote his enduring novel, A Passage To India.

Clifftop restaurant at Varkala

Sunset at Kumarakom

Books for Four Seasons

 I am an obsessive reader. Here I choose four of the many historical novels I have enjoyed in each season of 2011. It was hard to select but these are particularly good historical fictions.



Winter

Last winter I particularly liked This January Tale written in 1966  by Bryher, an unusual writer who is often forgotten.  It tells of how the people of England endured the aftermath of the Conquest in 1066. At its centre is the city of Exeter. For months the people of Exeter watched the progress of the Normans from a distance, hoping that they would not try to push so far west. This proved futile. The Conqueror came and besieged their city for three freezing, terrifying weeks. The magic of this novel is its re-creation of the England of 1066. Towns, fields, the primitive remote hamlets and great forests dominated the land, and Bryher's bleak book is beautifully written from the point of view of those who inhabited them. It is a novel which has had a particular influence on my current WIP, The Handfasted Wife.

Spring

Last Spring I read The Queen of Silks by Vanora Bennett. The Queen of Silks tells the story of a fictional relationship between Richard 111 and a silk merchant's daughter. It is notable for the careful way in which Bennett interweaves real historical characters and fictional ones. The characterisation is excellent and she brilliantly re-creates the final years of the English Wars of the Roses, those years leading up to 1484 and the Tudor take-over. Importantly, she faithfully describes London during this period- particularly from the perspective of the silk merchants, some of whom were women.

Summer

For summer my suggestion is Outlaw by Angus Donald. This is a story of Robin Hood from  Alan Dale's point of view. It is really Alan's story and an absolute page turner. Where else to be in summer but the medieval English green-wood with its caves, isolated manors and huge spreading oaks. I am impressed by Donald's plotting and also by the way in which he takes a legendary English hero ( made  famous during the Victorian era after his appearance in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe) and reinvents him as a ruthless but likeable war lord. Donald also faithfully recreates the atmosphere of the twelfth century. It was a period when many believed in the fantastic, dog men and mermaids and monopods, as well as being devout Christians.

Autumn

Lady of the English by Elizabeth Chadwick is an exceptional historical fiction. I read it in October and loved it. It tells the story of England's terrible twelfth century civil war emerging out of the power struggle between Matilda and her cousin Stephen. Can a woman be Queen in her own right in this period and remain unchallenged? Matilda's attempts to be Queen of England involve pursuit, escape, battles and high politics and perhaps a hint of romance along the way. Henry 1's second wife, (and Matilda's stepmother) Adeliza's story, parellels and intersects with that of Matilda.  Both stories are rivetting and the contrasting personalities are  engaging. I loved the way in which Chadwick's meticulous research is seemlessly integated into the novel's narrative and descriptions.

Happy Christmas and Happy Reading and, of course, there are many more superb historical fictions not mentioned here for us to read over the holiday period.

Mistletoe, Mont St Michel and a Norman Castle

It is the edge of Winter, a liminal time and the trees in Normandy have great balls of mistletoe growing amongst bared branches. In Norman towns people are preparing for Advent, hanging municiple decorations and holding Christmas craft markets. So, last week, we set out from our borrowed farmhouse in the Norman Bocage to visit places we had not seen in four years. It was bitterly cold but the skies were blue and because the tourist season is past, we had Bayeux, Mont Saint Michelle and Falaise almost to ourselves.


I have been reading a novel about Eleanor of Acquitaine so in Rouen Cathedral it was moving to see the tomb to her favourite son, Richard Coeur de Lion. It contains his heart. His body is entombed elsewhere. The Cathedral is magnificent, possessing an austere beauty and atmosphere, its Romanesque skeleton and pillars the colour of bleached bones. As for the colourful old city with its plethora of half timbered houses-I could imagine the ghost of Emma Bovary flitting about Rouen's medieval streets and courtyards.

Richard the Lionheart

Richard's preserved heart is one of Rouen's treasures.

In the confined space of a Medieval fortified city buildings had to be

tall and narrow to maximise living space.

Everytime I visit Bayeux I try to focus on something different in the Tapestry and each time I find myself being distracted by some new and hitherto un-noticed detail. This time it was the small things that caught my eye, notably the blazing comet that to the medieval mind signified a dramatic change in a kingdom's rule; the hand of God so elegant and significant reaching in blessing from the border; tiny figures ploughing, who, in the face of great events, represent life circling through the agricultural year, the figures and animals both filled with energy.

The Viking inspired longboat outside Bayeux's Tapestry Museum

is a reminder that the Normans antecedents were Viking.

 Norman warrior on horseback in the Museum

Gothic Mont St Michel is perched high on a rocky island surrounded by sands. When the tide comes in and the sun begins to set the Abbey is at its most atmospheric. I discovered my favourite views just by walking around the outside of the small town. On this route the jewel in the rock reveals itself to be a tiny garden with a statue of St Christopher, secret and tucked away beneath the looming abbey church. Below me miniscule figures walk the damp tidelines.

                                                                      Mont St Michel conveys both a sense of martial security and mystical power.

Another day we visited Falaise. There, we learned that William the Conqueror's castle was indeed built of stone. I checked because I had wondered if the original had been a wooden construction. Falaise emanates a sense of how a Norman medieval castle was, not primitive but sophisticated and probably comfortable. Falaise was a very pleasant seat by twelfth century standards with the latest in mod coms: spacious loos, deep windows, graceful stairways, light corridors and fireplaces set into pale walls. 

                                                                                                            William's Castle at Dusk

                                                                                                            A corridor in the Castle

The predominant theme for the self guided tour is chess because as a game it embodies the ultimate principle of power politics and control - "Protect the King!". Here it represents the power games that involved all the Dukes of medieval Normandy and the Kings of France from William the Conqueror who struggled with his son, Duke Robert to King John, his great, great grandson who finally lost Falaise to Philippe Augustus, the then French King.  

                                                                              In one of the Royal chambers there are life size chess pieces

                                                                                                  representing King, Queen and Knight.

The Tower

Philippe Augustus proceeded to celebrate his take-over by building his own tower to link the old part of the castle to his new build. Finally, we descended to the lowest rooms and there we found, at last, the sense of the Conqueror's castle, a much, much gloomier place.

  Descending to the lower depths

                                                                              The statue of Guillaume le Conquerant in Falaise near his castle

Leaving Normandy on a quiet November Sunday, laden with Christmas gifts from a tiny specialist shop in a back street of Villedieu les Poeles, I was tempted to pull down one of the balls of mistletoe that was roosting in the tree behind our house. Yet, I restrained my impulse. Mistletoe is better there growing into a memory, along with the dark birds that perch in the tree's highest branches. So, I left the mistletoe in its tree behind a small farmhouse down a country lane, in the depths of the Bocage, off the beaten track, in a territory that is permeated with echoes of its medieval past.