Arrival in Yercaud

 The reminiscences of my time in India in the 1980s are a sidetrack from the main theme of the blog but some of their contents do occasionally overlap with that theme and I enjoy the trip down memory lane so here is another one following chronologically on from the last.

We had arrived in India in April and it was now November. The seasons in South India are described as hot, hotter and hottest and I don't remember which is when but I have the feeling that the cooler weather was on its way now as one might expect at that time of year. This was certainly the case in Yercaud which is a hill station in the Shevaroys 5,000 feet above sea level so has a very different climate to the plains down below. That was one of the reasons the British developed such towns as Simla in the north and Ootacamund in the south, but there was a commercial element too because many of these hill stations were situated in tea growing areas though Yercaud, being slightly less elevated, was better suited to coffee. Coffee estates are more visually interesting than tea estates which resemble nothing so much as neat rows of suburban hedges. Coffee requires both sun and shade so growers plant trees interspersed with the coffee and in Yercaud these were often orange trees giving two crops on the same piece of land as well as two lots of very beautiful and sweet-smelling blossom. 

The van with all our possessions got to the town of Salem at the foot of the Shevaroy Hills without mishap which was somewhat surprising given its rickety state. There didn't appear to be any signs to Yercaud but there was only one road that led to the hills so we followed it. It was a lovely drive made more interesting because as you climbed the vegetation changed from typically tropical trees and plants to more temperate zone types. The air became cooler and fresher, and the light sharper. There were monkeys in the trees and scampering on the rocks by the side of the road like these fellows.

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind

Where did I leave that banana?

Roughly half way up the hill our van broke down. I was surprised it had got this far given its condition, but the driver was unperturbed and soon diagnosed the problem. The trouble was he had to go back to Salem, a good 10 miles away, to get a spare part for the engine. Luckily, there were buses plying this route and he got on one leaving Michael and me with the van. Michael then decided he had better get up to Yercaud to make sure the bungalow we had rented was ready for us and he got on a bus going the other way. These buses came by about once an hour and there was very little other traffic so I sat there by myself looking out over the hot dusty plains spread below and watching the monkeys until I got sleepy and stretched out on the parapet that bordered the road, presumably to stop cars plunging over the side. They didn't always work. On one occasion while I was living in the area a bus went over resulting in several deaths.

Michael came back after a couple of hours and then the driver returned with the spare part and we set off up the remainder of the 20 hairpin bends there were on the ghat road. Here is one of them.

And this shows the entrance into Yercaud. Note the cloud and the evergreen trees, showing that we are high up.

The name Yercaud comes from two Tamil words meaning lake and forest, and the lake is the first thing you see on arrival. I believe it has now been developed as a tourist resort with fishing and boating but in my day it was just a lake with some public gardens beside it on one side. 

Yercaud Lake

 We drove to the bungalow Michael had rented, albeit only for a couple of months as on his previous visit he had also located a property for sale that consisted of a pair of bungalows built on the terraced hillside so that on the lower level you had a well (there was no mains water) and the first bungalow. Then on the next level there was a stretch of garden with a few coffee and banana plants and some orange trees and finally at the top the main bungalow. It was ideal for running as a guest house. Michael had found this property through someone he had met on his initial trip who was a Syrian Christian called Tharyan Matthews. Syrian Christians are from Kerala for the most part and claim religious descent from St Thomas who is supposed to have landed on the Malabar Coast just a few years after the Crucifixion. They are ethnically Indians but use the rites of early Syriac Christianity hence their name. Tharyan (the name is a form of Alexander) and his wife Elizabeth would be good friends to us during our stay in Yercaud, helping us in many ways though the friendship did end on something of a sour note in what one might call typical Indian fashion. We will come to that another time.

The rented bungalow was basic but habitable. There was one large central living area and a couple of bedrooms but one was small and somewhat grubby so we used it to store our furniture, mostly bought at auction in Bangalore when we thought we would be living in Whitefield. We shared the other bedroom, and the first night passed reasonably well though I kept hearing strange noises but since the house was surrounded by quite thick woods I just thought it was the local nightlife. The noises were louder and seemed closer the next evening and then all of a sudden in the middle of the night Michael gave a great shout. It seemed something had run over his face and then tried to burrow down into his pyjamas. We turned on the lights and there were over a dozen rats in the room including several perched on a ledge or cornice that ran along the walls. They were looking at us inquisitively. We were clearly interlopers in their territory.

I can't remember how we got rid of the rats but we clearly did because we stayed in that bungalow for the next few weeks while the purchase of the other property went through. You may be wondering how we bought this other place, given the reason we had left Whitefield was that we, as foreigners, had not been granted permission to buy what was called immoveable property despite being assured by the Indian High Commission in London that we could. The answer is Michael had so set his heart on buying somewhere that he accepted Tharyan's offer to buy it in his name. Michael supplied the money which was about £20,000 (this was 1980 so that was not what it would be now but still was reasonable for 2 bungalows and a fairly decent amount of garden) and Tharyan's name went on the paperwork. I thought this was somewhat reckless but Tharyan seemed friendly and honest, and it was not my money.

We moved into the new bungalow in December 1980. It had taken several months, and a lot of work still needed to be done on the two bungalows and the garden which was heavily overgrown, but we had finally established ourselves in India.

 

From Whitefield to Yercaud

During our time in Whitefield Michael, who was a great animal lover, bought a strange looking creature in the Bangalore bazaar. Obviously some sort of primate, this is what it looked like.

I think you'll agree this is not a thing of beauty, but Michael bought it to save it. Despite the Hindu reverence for the cow and the doctrine of ahimsa (non-violence and respect for all living things), Indians do not treat animals particularly well. This one had been captured from a tree and was being used as an object of sport in the bazaar. Michael paid a few rupees to rescue it from its captors, and then decided to keep it as a pet. This was probably unwise as it was a wild animal but it seemed harmless enough. We fed it bits of fruit and rice, and Michael bought an old bird cage to keep it in at night. During the day it ran around the house except when Michael went out to the local shops when he took it with him wrapped round the back of his neck. The sight of an eccentric Englishman bicycling around the village with a furry scarf soon became a source of amusement for the locals, but it was affectionate amusement because Michael was a popular figure there.

This carried on for a while and in that time we learned that Montrose, as Michael called him, was a slender loris which is an arboreal primate that is, as one might have guessed from the eyes, nocturnal. And that became a problem. During the night Montrose would whistle constantly so we let him out to roam around the house. I was having severe doubts about keeping him and wanted to release him back into the wild but Michael had grown attached to him. Then things got worse. Montrose discovered that he was a carnivore. He caught insects and that changed his character. From being quite mild and gentle he became aggressive and would bite. Not me because I was now fed up with him and left him alone but he bit Michael enough to draw blood and shortly afterwards Michael became quite ill. I decided enough was enough and took Montrose into the jungle where I put him in a tree, back where he belonged. Some South African Sai Baba devotees who lived locally showed a forgiving spirit and brought Michael restorative soup to get him back on his feet. I say they were forgiving because I had met one of them a short while before and, not realising he was a devotee, had spoken critically of Sai Baba. When I finished he calmly told me that he was a devotee, a lesson in think before you open your mouth I have subsequently learned.  But, as I said in a previous post, the devotees were all good people even if, in my estimation, they were spiritually naive.

When Michael had recovered we were invited to dinner by an Anglo-Indian ex-army officer who lived in Whitefield with his family. Whitefield had originally been set up as a retirement colony, so-called, for Anglo-Indians who worked on the railways as many of them did in British times. We had first met this person through some rather extraordinary ladies we had known in Bangalore. These were four Parsee sisters, probably in their seventies, who lived in a beautiful but rundown old bungalow in Grant Road near the Bombay Ananda Bhavan, the guesthouse that we had stayed in for several weeks before moving to Whitefield. There was something a bit Miss Havisham-like about these sisters. They were all spinsters, very aristocratic with pale paper thin skin covering boney features. They lived surrounded by the souvenirs of yesteryear with an equally elderly servant looking after them. Their father had been a rich lawyer and probably they had not married because there was no one of their caste and class and religion available in Bangalore. But they were very sweet and kind, and Michael and I were often invited to tea, on one occasion meeting the ex-army officer who now had invited us to his house.

Colonel De Souza turned out to be the solution to our problem about what to do after our attempt to buy a property in Whitefield fell through. He asked us if we had heard of Yercaud, a hill station in Tamil Nadu about 150 miles south of Bangalore. At 5,000 feet of elevation he thought it offered an ideal climate for Europeans and also presented opportunities to run a guesthouse as people went there in the summer to escape the heat of the plains. He knew of it because he had been to school there at Montfort, a Catholic private school, and he gave us the name of a couple of contacts. A week later Michael went off on a reconnaissance trip. I stayed behind in Whitefield because I was helping some visiting Christian missionaries redecorate their little chapel. They had come to our house because we were the only Westerners in Whitefield who were not Sai Baba devotees. They soon realised we were not going to be converted to their brand of Christianity but we remained friendly.

When Michael came back from Yercaud he was full of enthusiasm. He liked the town and its surroundings and had actually found a house to rent. I was happy to go along with this because the time felt right to move on, and Yercaud seemed a good place for us to go, both climate and area wise. We started to make arrangements to pack up and move.

 Before we did move though we had to find someone to take up the lease on the house we had rented for a 6 month period, all paid for in advance. We had only been there for 4 months and assumed the landlord would reimburse us the 2 months outstanding if we found someone to take up the lease. We soon did through the devotees we knew and arranged to meet the landlord with the new tenants to sign the relevant documents. The landlord accepted a cheque from the new people which included payment for the 2 months at the end of our tenancy but then, having given us to understand he would reimburse us those 2 months, declined to do so. The incoming tenants were embarrassed and we were angry but there was nothing to be done. This was not our last bad experience of Indian business practices but there was no use fussing over what could not be changed so a couple of days later we loaded everything we possessed into a small truck and headed south to Yercaud. 

Mysore and Secunderabad

When we realised that we would not be able to buy a property in India we had to reassess our situation. While living at the Shilton Hotel we had become friendly with several fellow long-term residents. One was a German called Max who worked at the Goethe Institute in Bangalore. He had an Indian wife who took a great shine to Michael and he called her for some reason known only to himself, because it certainly wasn't her name, Petunia. Here they are together in the grounds of the hotel.

Another acquaintance was also given a soubriquet by Michael though this one had some kind of rationale to it. This gentleman was the ex-Iranian ambassador to Switzerland who had gone into exile after the Iranian revolution when the Shah was deposed a couple of years previously. It must have been quite a comedown, from being an ambassador to living in a middle ranking hotel in India, but he seemed to take it all philosophically. He had lost his wife, and his daughter was still in Iran so he was by himself. His daughter did come out to see him while we were there and she was a totally Westernised woman in terms of education and dress, but now she had to cover her head when in her own country. Unlike her father who seemed to accept the situation in his homeland, she had a decidedly fiery attitude to the new regime. When asked what she thought about it she drew her finger across her throat and said "I want to kill them!". One forgets how Westernised Iran was under the Shah, though maybe it was only the case for the educated elite.

I don't remember the ambassador's real name but it was something like Monsieur Mogadon. I give him that title because his French was better than his English so we spoke to him mostly in French, a language in which Michael was fluent, having lived there for a while in his childhood, and I was reasonably competent, having done it to A level standard. Michael called him Moggie which delighted him and they used to play cards together in the evening. Here is a photo of Michael, Moggie and Max in Whitefield with a flame of the forest tree in the background. 

Inspired by Michael, Moggie had also bought himself a solar topi.

Here's a photo of Moggie and me in the same place.

We were in Whitefield because after we found out we couldn't buy the bungalow we decided to move there anyway. We rented a small house with a little garden for 6 months, and some of our Bangalore friends would occasionally come by to visit. However, we still needed to find a more permanent solution and an Indian friend suggested that Michael apply to the Maharajah of Mysore, a friend of whose grandfather he had once known, for a job of some kind. Over 40 years later this seems a strange thing to have considered, given our original purpose in going to India, but Michael wrote to the Maharajah anyway and he replied quite quickly suggesting an interview. So, off we went to Mysore.

In fact, we had visited Mysore on a day trip earlier as it's not far from Bangalore and is one of the more interesting cities in Karnataka state. It's famous for its palace which is a mixture of the magnificent and the kitsch. Designed by an Englishman in the early 20th century in the Indo-Saracenic style for the grandfather of the current (in 1980) Maharajah, it combines European and Indian influences for a result that is undeniably impressive but veers towards Disneyland on occasion. More to my taste were the 1,000 year old Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple in nearby Srirangapatna and the 18th century summer palace of Tipu Sultan.

We arrived at the palace for the interview with the Maharajah and were inevitably kept waiting for an hour or so. This was only to be expected as the hierarchy must be enforced, but eventually a servant arrived to tell us that His Highness would see us now. This caused Michael to crack a smile and he told me as we progressed through dark passages to meet the Maharaja that his father, who was a large man, had been affectionally known as His Heaviness. When we got to the royal chamber we could see that the family propensity for a generous girth had passed from father to son. The Maharajah was seated on a throne raised on a platform with his petite wife sitting at a lower level, more or less at his feet. Here's a picture of the two of them at their wedding about 4 years previous to our meeting.

He motioned to us to be seated on a bench about 15 feet away from him and asked if we would like some refreshment. We thanked him at which a servant brought us some coffee in one of the metal cups often used in South India. Then we saw why the Maharaja might have got to be the size he was. He was given four cups of coffee and a whole chicken. Rather than drink the coffee, he just poured it down his throat, one cup after another. Then he ate the chicken with his fingers during which time we sat silently. When he had finished he asked Michael a bit about himself. Michael talked about his previous time in India as ADC to the Governor of the Punjab and the Viceroy, and the Maharaja nodded politely but there was no mention of any job. His wife didn't speak during the interview but sat silently staring ahead the whole time. I was asked my name but not much more. After about 20 minutes the Maharaja indicated that the interview was over. We got up, thanked him and were escorted from the palace. We never heard anything more. It was all rather strange.

Michael's second attempt to get some kind of job was almost as odd as the first. Someone told him that the club at Secunderabad was looking for a new secretary. Clubs in India were an inheritance from British days when people would get together after a day's work to socialise and drink. The game of snooker was invented by a British army officer in the 19th century in an Indian club. Michael wrote to the Secunderabad Club offering his services, and they asked him to come for an interview. I was against this because, as before, it seemed to have nothing to do with our reason for coming to India, and I had no interest in being a hanger on in such circumstance. But by this time we had been in the country for several months and all our plans had come to naught so I agreed to give it a go and see what transpired so we went to Secunderabad.

Secunderabad was a twin city to Hyderabad, the two being separated by a large lake, but they have now more or less merged into one. However, originally Secunderabad was developed by the British while the old Indian city of Hyderabad was ruled by the Nizam who at one time had the reputation of being the richest man in the world with jewels the size of eggs. The nearby mines of Golconda were renowned for producing diamonds in the 17th century amongst which was the famous Koh-i-Noor now set in a British Royal Family crown and on display at the Tower of London.

We stayed at the club for a couple of days and it was very pleasant as you can see from these pictures, still run as it would have been in British times with a strict dress code and servants waiting on your every whim.

But it was not why we were in India and when it turned out that the club was not looking for a secretary after all I was pleased though I did wonder why on earth they had asked us to travel over 300 miles to inform us of that. We returned to Whitefield to see what might happen next.

I have not mentioned the Masters but they did occasionally speak to me through Michael at this time. I would never have asked them what we should do, that was up to us, but I believed we would be guided and such did turn out to be the case.

In Bangalore

 After a few weeks in Bombay (see previous Indian Story posts), we took the train to Bangalore which we intended to use as a base from which to explore the south of India, our idea being to buy a property to run as a small guest house. The journey took about 24 hours, and we arrived late at night with no plan as to where we might stay. Somewhat misguidedly, we put ourselves in the hands of a taxi driver at the station and, given we were Westerners and not hippies, he took us to what was obviously one of the most expensive hotels in the city. Being too hot and tired to go anywhere else at that time of night, we booked a room there but the next day after making a few enquiries, we transferred to a place called the Shilton Hotel which was in St Marks Road, and this was to be our home for the next month.

The Shilton was an old fashioned hotel which had rooms in small individual buildings spread out over a compound which is what you call a garden in India. The trees and flowers in the south were all new to me. The main tree, which lined roads all over the city, was the Flame of the Forest which puts out bright red blooms when it flowers so that the tree really can appear, especially at sunset as though it is on fire. There was one of these in the compound, in flower when we arrived, and there were also several beds of canna lilies which are also red though there are orange and yellow varieties too, all very different to the more subdued English flowers I was used to. 

Bangalore was favoured by the British because its elevation on the Deccan Plateau at nearly 3,000 feet above sea level gives it a relatively cool climate, cool for the South of India. The British established it as a cantonment town, meaning an army garrison, and from that beginning it became a Civil and Military Station, developing into one of the more attractive cities in the country with many fine buildings, both state and residential. The cantonment was established in 1809 for a mixed civilian and military population and comprised bungalows, gardens, race courses, clubs and parade grounds. It stood apart from the main Indian city with a definite colonial air and there was still a trace of that remaining in 1980. All of these colonial houses were attractive and some were really quite grand. Alas, most of them have been pulled down now in the usual acts of cultural vandalism to be replaced by ugly modern buildings, but in 1980 there were still a large number around the city, with many in the area where we were staying.

Michael had been a captain in the Guides regiment of the Indian army in pre-independence days when it had British officers, and he dressed accordingly, favouring khaki shorts with long socks and heavy Afghan sandals which he called chappals. All topped off with a solar topi, the pith helmet that the British wore during colonial days. I certainly wasn't going to dress like that but he did insist I wear a hat while in the sun for which I am grateful as many Westerners in those days didn't and suffered the consequences. I wasn't going to wear a topi but a cotton cricket hat offered sufficient protection. I never wore sun cream the whole time I was in India. People didn't in those days, no doubt unwisely.

After a short period looking for properties we found a bungalow with enough rooms for a few guests in the small town of Whitefield, about 15 miles from the centre of Bangalore. We fixed on this as Whitefield was the site for one of the main ashrams for Satya Sai Baba so there was a constant stream of Western visitors. At that time it was just a small village with some old bungalows and a few modern houses, a sleepy little place where nothing much went on except for the ashram. Now, since Bangalore has become the IT capital of India, it has been completely transformed. See here. One can either admire the industry that affected this transformation or be horrified at the wholesale destruction of a pleasant rural village with no building more than one floor high, and its conversion into a giant temple to Mammon.

Before we left the UK we had visited the Indian High Commission to ask if foreigners could buy 'immovable property', as it was called, in India, and we had been assured they could. All that was needed was the appropriate permission, and that was just a formality. Consequently, we didn't anticipate any problems in buying the Whitefield bungalow. We were wrong. We hired a lawyer (always a risk in India) to make the application, and were told the necessary permission should be granted in a couple of weeks. The two weeks turned into a month and then 6 weeks and then we were informed that permission was refused. The formality had become an impossibility.  We re-applied, wasting more money on the lawyer who was probably just stringing us along, but permission was once again turned down and we had now wasted 3 months. Later we found out that if we had greased enough palms at the ministry in Bombay we might have been successful, but either through naivety or integrity that did not occur to us, even to Michael who was familiar with Indian affairs and knew you could basically trust no one. Indians are generally very kind and friendly but the fabled spirituality of the sub-continent rarely extends to the moral sphere. Actually, the owner of the property we had been hoping to buy was an exception to this rule. He had kindly taken his house off the market while we were waiting for permission to buy, and we felt we had let him down but he was philosophical about it, and held no ill-feeling, even inviting us to dinner. The moral of the story is that generalisations are generally true but one can't assume them always to be so. I met many kind and generous Indians while in the country. On the other hand, we were ripped off and cheated several times. This was just the first. 

Back to square one. While waiting for permission to buy the house in Whitefield we had moved out of the Shilton to somewhere cheaper. The costs mount up when living in a hotel, even in India.  In fact, we only moved a few hundred yards to a guesthouse called the Bombay Ananda Bhavan which means Bombay Bliss House. This wasn't what you might think from the name, being a perfectly respectable establishment run by an old gentleman by the name of Mr Gupta. It was situated down a side street called Grant Road just off the main strand on which the Shilton stood, and was a two storey bungalow with a dozen or so rooms. I found some pictures of it on the Internet from about 10 years after we were there but it looks exactly the same.

The entrance

A bedroom with mosquito nets

The first floor balcony

The guesthouse was used by devotees of Sai Baba and they would take taxis twice a day to his ashram 15 miles away for darshan which is when the holy man graces his disciples with his presence. Michael and I were the only people in the guesthouse who were not devotees. For those who don't know, Sai Baba was a popular guru in the 80s and beyond who claimed he was God incarnate in human form. He had a large afro and wore a long orange dress which was peculiar to himself, not traditional garb. His main claim to fame was that he had magical powers. He could produce objects out of thin air and regularly did so, often holy ash but also sometimes small religious artefacts etc, even gold. I don't doubt that he really could do this. He wasn't just a sleight-of-hand prestidigitator. I am equally sure that he was not a genuine holy man. For one thing, no true holy man indulges in this spiritual showing off of miraculous power. The siddhis, as they are known, are regarded as diversions and stumbling blocks to the seeker, and to display them is spiritual vulgarity on a grand scale. Then there was his claim to divinity. This is another sure sign of inflation and inauthenticity. But most of all, as far as I was concerned, the vibration he gave off was decidedly unholy. I am not going to include a picture of him but look it up if you are interested and see if you don't agree that this is not the face of a holy person. There were scandals that surrounded him even at the time but I won't go into those here. 

Having said all that, the Western devotees we met at the guest-house and elsewhere were all good and decent people, sincere, albeit naive, spiritual seekers. Sai Baba was obviously an exceptional individual but a good example of how you must exercise discrimination while on this path. The devotees were constantly asking Michael and me to go with them to a darshan, and eventually we did. I have to say that all my suspicions were confirmed by the sight of Sai Baba coming out to the awe-struck crowd and, in lordly fashion, accepting their love and unconditional adoration with benevolent condescension. He produced some vibhuti or holy ash, took a few letters with requests for blessings or whatever, and then after a brief period went back inside. That was enough for the devotees who had taken a round 30 mile trip for a 15 minutes mass audience, and were prepared to do the same again in the afternoon. "He cured my diarrhoea!", one young lady told me excitedly. I was only 24 at the time and somewhat concerned that my feelings about this man were totally at variance with what most other spiritually inclined people thought of him, but Michael told me to trust my intuition and go by what I felt, and I have to say this is excellent advice for anyone whose instincts point them in a certain direction, even if good opinion is against you.

To be continued.

The Kanheri Caves

The second place I visited while in Bombay waiting to go further south was the Kanheri Caves which are rock-cut caves about 25 miles from the city located in what is now called the Sanjay Gandhi National Park though it wasn't a national park at the time of my visit in 1980. These caves (there are over 100 of them) are cousins to the better known Karla Caves, also in the state of Maharastra and also Buddhist in inspiration. The ones at Karla are believed to date in construction from the second century BC continuing up to the fifth AD. Now they are fairly remote but at the time they were created this area formed part of an important trade route that ran between the Arabian Sea and the Deccan, the great plateau that sprawls over the centre of India. Karla is significant because of its Chaitya which is a shrine or prayer hall. The decorated stupa and columns, now almost 2,000 years old, remain in an excellent state of preservation, and there are fine sculptures of Buddhas on elephants and what are called Mithuna couples, Mithuna being a Tantric concept representing the union of complementary forces that lies behind all creation.

The Great Chaitya

Elephant sculptures

Panel at the entrance to the hall

There is nothing quite as grand as this at Kanheri but it is still impressive. The caves are cut out of basalt, the hard dark rock also used in Egypt which seems to lend an air of mystery to the objects into which it is carved. Many of these caves were Buddhist viharas or monasteries and include a small stone platform serving as a bed for the monks. I once slept on something similar at an ashram and can vouch for the toughness of those ancient monks.

There is a Chaitya here too which is like the one at Karla though not quite as well preserved. When I visited it had the usual pungent odour of bat droppings but still managed to retain an atmosphere of peace and prayer.

 At the entrance to this hall there is a statue of the Buddha standing in a pose of upright meditation as below.

This turned out to have some local significance because while we were at the site we were told about a holy man living nearby who had acquired a reputation by practising a form of tapas or asceticism which involved standing up all the time. The Hare Krishna devotee with whom we were visiting the caves wanted to go and see him, and I went along too which involved, as far as I remember, a short trek into the surrounding jungle which looked something like this.

When we found the sadhu in a secluded part of the forest he was very friendly. He didn't speak English but there was an attendant with him who told us he had been doing this for 20 years, and had neither sat nor laid down for all that time. You may wonder how he slept but a rail about 3 feet high had been installed for him and he leant on that from time to time. I mentioned this incident in Meeting the Masters where I hinted I felt he was rather wasting his time, but who can say? He was obviously inspired by the prodigious feats of asceticism related in stories of yogis from the distant past, and though the past was a different time with different demands and practices, it may be that for some people spiritual benefits can come from extreme physical austerities and self-mortification. The root meaning of the word tapas is heat, and the idea is that tapas can burn away material desires and attachments while at the same time creating an inner energy akin to spiritual fire which can lead to liberation and enlightenment. The modern spiritual seeker does not really deny himself much and comforts himself for his lack of effort in that department by saying it is the mind not the body that should be disciplined. But disciplining the body is a form of disciplining the mind, and one which, taken to the extreme it was here, would be beyond most of us. So, perhaps this sadhu was standing up to be spiritually counted (if you'll forgive the pun) more than most of us.

When we returned to the cave complex we were told to look at cave 34 where there were paintings of the Buddha on the ceiling. The paintings were very faded and not much compared to the famous ones at Ajanta 250 miles away, but the best of them shown here is still striking with its graceful simplicity, all the more so considering it is 1500 years old.

Buddhism has long gone from India but this was the country of its birth, and the religion is Indian through and through. It may have absorbed characteristics from the various lands where it has been adopted, magic from Tibet, Taoist influences from China and even a kind of military quality from Japan, but the core idea of detaching oneself from the material world for entry into the spiritual peace of enlightenment is pure Indian. The Kanheri caves and others like them, of which there are many, bear witness to the age-old search for truth on the sub-continent.

Elephanta

 In 1979 I spent a month in India visiting the north of the country, going to Calcutta, Darjeeling, Varanasi, Delhi, Agra and Srinagar. I wrote about this trip in Meeting the Masters in the context of that book. I also mentioned that I returned to live in India in 1980 and spent 5 years there but did not include much about that time in the book since it wasn't directly relevant to the main theme. However, some readers said they enjoyed the travel interlude, and suggested I write some more about my subsequent life in India. Over the course of this blog's lifetime I have put up a few posts about my time in India, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, but I thought I might now write a more sustained narrative covering that period in my life.

I am at Bath railway station waiting for a train to go to London. On the ground is a steel trunk about 4 feet long by 2 feet wide and 2 feet deep. It contains all my possessions, bar a record player. That is taking a sea voyage and will arrive at its destination in a couple of months. The record player is not travelling alone. It has been packed in a tea chest along with a few bits of furniture that belong to my friend Michael Lord. We are flying to Bombay to start a new life in India.

The date is early April 1980. Michael and I had been living in Bath for around 15 months, running a stall in an antiques centre by day but actually living a life dedicated to meditation and the spiritual path. That story has been told in my book Meeting the Masters along with how I was spoken to by spiritual beings who instructed me in the nuts and bolts of the spiritual life as it applied to told me at that time. These beings, who spoke to me through the mediumship of Michael, told me think of them as messengers from God, and from their words and quality that is just what they seemed to be. I appreciate that seems improbable in the context of the modern world but it might be reassuring to spiritual seekers to know that such beings do exist and do watch over us whether they engage directly with us on the physical plane or not.

Michael and I had been to India for a month-long holiday in September 1979, and I assumed that was that as far as my contact with the country was concerned. But in the weeks following our return we came to the realisation that it would be easier to follow our way of life out in India, and began making plans to move there. When I mentioned this to the Masters they confirmed it was their wish we did this but we had to come to the understanding ourselves without being directly prompted by them. Free will is sacrosanct in the spiritual world.

Having made the decision, we then had to determine what part of India to go to. Michael knew the north of the country well, having served there as ADC first to the Governor of the Punjab and then to the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, during the Second World War when he learnt to speak Urdu. He had also visited for extended stays on a couple occasion since, the most recent time being just before he met me when he managed the guest house of the Hare Krishnas at their headquarters in Juhu which is a suburb of Bombay. However, we decided to go to the South as that remained relatively traditional and in tune with its spiritual roots to a greater degree than the North which had seen many centuries of Muslim occupation, some relatively positive, Akbar and Shah Jahan, some much less so under their successor Aurangzeb. In contrast, the spiritual roots of the South were undisturbed over many centuries, some would say, millennia.

Our initial plan was to go to Bangalore and then make plans from there. To that end, we flew first to Bombay (now Mumbai but I shall mostly call all the towns which have been renamed by the names I was familiar with), where we were going to spend a couple of weeks staying with Michael's friends at the Hare Krishna guesthouse before going further south. Michael had never been a devotee but he was sympathetic, and although I came to the group with a slightly cynical view due to my experience of seeing Western Hindus chanting and dancing around Piccadilly Circus in their ochre robes, trying to be something they very clearly were not, I found them charming and sincere in their ashram so I have nothing but good to say of them. The majority of them were honest seekers even if I believe they would have been better off elsewhere as their cultural origins made a Vaishnavite Bhakti religion deeply rooted in Indian tradition quite alien to them. It would require them always to be playing a role which could never be theirs. That is not a good basis for a spiritual path.

While we were staying at the Hare Krishna ashram we visited a few local places, local by Indian standards that is. But the first really was close by, being an island located in Bombay Harbour a mile or so offshore. This is the site of the famous caves temples at Elephanta which were constructed around the 7th century AD, and in my opinion are one of the marvels of India. There are several rock-cut temples dedicated to Shiva on this little island, and they contain some of the most imposing statues of ancient India. The statue of a god or spiritual being should manifest that being's presence, and the ones at Elephanta project extraordinary power and even a touch of spiritual terror. Gods should be terrifying because they are incomprehensible and far above us. They are not comfortable or safe. 

A picture of the cave entrance from 1858

Inside the Caves today

The most famous sculpture in these caves is the Trimurti. It is a relief carving over 20 feet high of the three-headed Siva in his form of Sadasiva who is the Supreme God of the universe in Saiva Siddhanta. The three heads represent the traditional trinity of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Siva the destroyer, the three principal forces in the universe according to Hinduism. These are normally three different gods but here they are presented as manifestations of Siva, three aspects of one god.

The Trimurti

The face on the right is the Brahma aspect. He holds a lotus flower, symbol of creation. On the left is Siva as Rudra, the old Vedic god, notoriously swift to anger. He has a moustache giving him a military appearance which is appropriate for the fierce destroyer. In the centre, facing the worshipper, is the Vishnu aspect who appears to be in meditation and transmits a sense of deep peace. The statue has two dvarapalas on either side. These are guards who protect the sanctum of the deity from the profane. They mark out the sacred space which the god fills with his presence, and are a barrier between the material and the spiritual, a kind of boundary marker but also performing a similar function to the cherubim with the flaming sword who stands at the entrance to the Garden of Eden, preventing Adam and Eve from returning.

To the left of the Trimurti there is a 16 feet high statue of an Ardhanaishvara who is a decidedly strange figure. Look closely at the picture here and you will see why.

A  four-armed Ardhanarishvara 

The figure is badly damaged but enough remains to see that this is a representation of a half male/half female being. Seemingly absurd, even in our deluded days, it makes some sort of sense if you see it as a representation of the totality of cosmic existence pre-creation. One side shows Siva's consort Parvati with a female breast, long hair, a womanly hip protruding out and a mirror in one of her hands. The other side depicts the masculine Siva, and the whole represents the spiritual state including but beyond the division into two sexes when Siva and his Sakti, which stand for consciousness and creative energy, are one. The ancient Indian system recognised that sex lies at the root of reality, the one becoming two in order to create so while this figure may be preposterous and even, in my view, somewhat blasphemous as a literal being, interpreted symbolically it does carry a certain truth.

In the centre of the main cave there is a shrine to the linga which is the symbol of Siva in his most primal or unmanifest form so representing the god at his most archaic level. This is the heart of the temple and source of its spiritual power. The linga or lingam stands for pure consciousness and the formless reality that underlies all things, but it is also the creative and destructive power that calls the universe into being and then returns it to cosmic dust. In the picture here you can see it as the dark, rather stunted pillar-like object through the doorway guarded by two more dvarapalas. The linga normally sits in a yoni which is the container of the female force, the two together symbolising the masculine and feminine creative powers of the universe, Siva and his Sakti which are the equivalents of spirit and raw matter in this system.

Siva linga shrine

There are several other statues in these caves and the Wikipedia article from which I took these pictures includes excellent descriptions of them. It's been a long time since I was there but I remember the impression of power and mystery present at the the site and particularly coming out from the statues. This was a religious conception very different to that which inspired the churches and cathedrals I had previously known. It spoke of deep and dark mysteries which could fascinate the soul, but there was little sense of light or purity or the upliftment to be found in Christian iconography. I recall that Michael who had seen it before said he felt somewhat repelled by it though could appreciate the artistic genius that lay behind it. I understood what he meant. To this day I am in two minds about its spiritual qualities. Siva was a pre-Vedic, pre-Aryan god and his worship goes back to the ancient past. In Indian religion nothing is rejected. Everything is assimilated and becomes part of the whole which results in profound metaphysical knowledge lying alongside very primitive concepts and practices. Siva worship undoubtedly includes both. The shrine at Elephanta is an extraordinary attempt to express the mysteries of existence but it explores the depths more than it scales the heights.