Hassan appears abruptly on NH48, without an arch, without an announcement, with no landmark at all. Arriving from Bangalore, you turn right from the highway to go into town. The train delivers you into the same street, which is named the Bangalore-Mangalore Road. You cannot yet fly in—birds still command the airspace over land allotted for an airport. No one is missing an airport in Hassan. There is a wish for a direct train to Bangalore, about which if some people are vocal they are speaking in whispers.

Hassan is a quiet town. You must count out the recent aberration.

The street runs into the town square with the typical buildings of small-town India flanking it. For a town which is the headquarters of the district which covers the Hoysala heartland, there isn’t anywhere a serious attempt at architecture. But there is a strange, becoming air to the town, to the wide main street, and the pleasing, sprawling town-square to which a statue of the great Dr. Ambedkar points from the government offices, without actually meaning to.

In the line of sight of that illustrious man, a leisurely policeman sometimes guides traffic which mostly manages itself.

Bars line the street, some of which open at six in the morning after having closed at eleven last night. I have watched a show in a movie theater in their midst. There were enough mosquitoes for each person to have their own private swarm to torment them, but when the movie commenced and the speakers burst into peak-volume, no one cared about the mosquitoes: the star was Shriya, and with Rajanikanth’s voice at its desired depth, everyone put up with every suffering, ignored even the smell of sweat, and the moist heat and cool that blew from hefty fans on the walls.

Hassan is as agrarian now as in the time of the Hoysala—it was agriculture that powered the art and architecture of his golden age. Today’s farmers may be seen in town, in shops that sell farm implements, fertilizers, and tractors and tillers. The furrows on their faces seem to me the deep lines of fortitude, and I have admired their inner and exterior strength. They are often in Hotel Hassan Ashhok with executives from Pepsi and such, who are helping them to grow potatoes for chips, and I have marveled at their enterprise.

Over dinner last week, Dr. Nagaraj, soil scientist with Hassan’s Krishi Vignyana Kendra, spoke with me regarding the challenges before Hassan’s farmers. He had returned from a field trip where a farmer had narrated his story before his wife, while his mother tended a buffalo nearby. Last year, he’d pledged his wife’s thali, and his mother’s, to raise money to grow potato, and the crop failed. “What shall I do now—anna,” he had cried. Nagaraj argues that there is no solution for the farmer save a strong intervention by the government.

I don’t understand how, but they enjoy this risky business in Hassan. You can tell that in the district stadium, where in the morning people walk and jog to radio broadcasts on the best methods to grow ragi, sunflower, rice. When I was there last month, the topic was uddinabele. Last Thursday, I listened to the incredible medicinal benefits muttidare-muni holds in every cell, and was filled with remorse at having so relentlessly teased that angel-shrub all through my childhood. The young in the stadium are unto themselves, and I cannot tell if the elders listen, but several of those I pass speak of gains from this crop and losses on another, of buying a tiller or bolstering a bund, of loaning some pipes and losing two valves.

McAuliffe is General Manager of Allana Coffee, and lives on its campus south of Hassan. At 70, after decades of sifting and processing coffee, he is a revered expert. Right now, he is short of labor at his coffee curing plant, but where are all the young going? “The women to the factories; the men to construction work.” But manufacturing jobs are not so many: Himatsingke Seide have employed several hundred women in their new factory in the Hassan Growth Centre. The National Textile Corporation has established a textile SEZ before Himatsingke. But two is not a large number, and in the remaining vast area only a few medium-sized factories have surfaced, for cold storage, automobile servicing, granite processing, hollow-block manufacturing.

Increased construction activity is visible, though: A new “high-tech” bus stand, almost ready; a spruced up train station; new government colleges for engineering, medicine, and agriculture; new hospitals; expansion and diversification among existing educational institutions; a large campus for training for the transport corporation; an institution for biofuels; windmills over low hills in the distance; and fresh activity at ISRO MCF. All these, happening simultaneously, suggest imminent change.

Is growth finally coming to town? There’s a place in Hassan where you can go for answers.

The Hasanamba Temple is on a spacious quadrangle in the middle of a tight maze of small shops and old houses, some pretty and well preserved. The deity is Parvathi, manifest as a hutta in this temple, and in the mind’s eye of those gifted with such sight, she is smiling. So she is Hasanamba, the smiling Goddess, and this hometown of hers is Hassan, after her divine smile. Her darshan is allowed for a two-week period once yearly, around Deepavali. Tradition has it that while closing the temple after Deepavali, they leave before her some rice, flowers, and a lit lamp. Next year, when they open, the rice is hot and ready to eat, the lamp is burning, and on the flowers there’s morning dew. Some say that perhaps miracle of the rice happened only in the virtuous past.

The Hassanamba Temple’s twin is in the compound, whose deity is Siddeswara, carved on a rock face, into which ten centuries of worship have infused a divinity whose weight is in the air. The rock face is plastered with a good number of moist flowers, and when they dry they fall, each in its time. When I entered, an old man had squatted before the deity, was speaking to it. Would something he’d planned succeed? Twice the flower had fallen on Siddeswara’s left, and the man wouldn’t leave without an amen: “So many times you have blessed me; you have given me everything; what happened now?” I closed my eyes for my prayer, and afterward, anxiously avoided seeing what fell, and where—one fall would damn, or delight us both, simultaneously. I left; his monologue continued.

Without new industries arriving, Hassan will stay a mere bed for a night or a place for a meal for those in transit to Belur and Halebid, or the coffee belt, the ghats, or Shravanabelagola. Even emperor Chandragupta came by Hassan, but only for sanyasa. What is it in the air now that signals that Hassan is astir, and will draw people who will stoke great enterprise in it?

They may know at Cafe Coffee Day, who have advanced until the twenty-seventh kilometer to Hassan. When will they arrive in the town square?

Two minutes before arriving in Halebid a farm came up, its house painted in pink and green fluorescent colors completely foreign to this region, but our eyes were drawn beyond the startling walls of the house to a mound shaped like the smooth top of a giant sarcophagus fifty meters behind the house. The mound, we went in and saw, is indeed a grave, a burial performed by nature, of what would once have been a temple, which you can guess from the pieces of granite sticking out of the mound: capitals, pieces of friezes, broken lintel, sections of columns. Some pieces are carved all round, some on one or two faces, and all of them are of the class of the Hoysala.

The mound is overgrown with grass, prickly and hard now in this hot, dry season. There are short trees over it and around, and in their shade you can take relief offered by an occasional whisper of a breeze. What is the right action regarding the dead thing that is buried there? Exhume it and put together the members that have been smashed by man and crushed by nature? Put back into the garbha one of the many idols that are strewn everywhere in this capital of the Hoysala, and consecrate it, and begin prayers? And have the Nikon and the Canon and the Leica arrive with their owners to cock a look at this photogenic art of nine centuries ago? Or is it best that bygones be bygones, and so leave alone the grass and the trees and the teasing breeze and let them soothe the body and revive the soul of the rare visitor in this small, private property?

The owner thought we were from “the department” and wouldn’t change his reading even when we assured him that we weren’t, wishing not to worry him. But he wanted us to be from the department, with the hope that there lurked an omen in our visit. He has arranged a daughter’s marriage for later in the month.

We went to the quieter Jain temples behind the Hoysaleswara temple, where the carvings are fewer, and the austerity of the Jain religion prevails. Before Shanthinatha, an old lady with her saree and blouse rumpled, her hair mussed up, swayed as if in a trance, and sang with the great Meera’s fervor. Her song wasn’t melodious, yet it was pleasant. But she didn’t know the thirthankara before her was Shanthinatha. Another visitor told her whose statue this was, and also that the next temple is for Adinatha, and next to that, facing the main gate, for Parshwanatha. In all the time we were there no more than ten persons visited, and two of them arrived with us, and retired to a corner and the man laid his hand on the woman’s lap, and she cut his nails.

Prayers are offered daily to the three thirthankaras by the two Jain families in the village at the feet of the temple terrace. When they were new they’d have been terribly important, with Queen Shanthala their patron, and the completion of the Parshwanatha temple coinciding with a great victory for King Vishnuvardhana against a northern enemy.

The manicure done, the couple left along with us, only a few steps ahead.

The State has no doubt regarding the benefits that it can pick from the past. To add color and shine to itself, it has installed a huge hoarding before Halebid’s Hoysaleshwara Temple with pictures on it of the principal political actors in the ruling party, and of their favored guru, all arranged with due attention to protocol. The State recently celebrated the 500th anniversary of the ascension of the great Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara, whose portrait is alongside the other pictures, but quite apart from them. Krishnadeveraya’s dynasty assumed power some distance north, in Vijayanagara (Hampi), soon after the last Hoysala fell to the Turk. I tried to take a picture of the sweeping view of the Temple complex, but the hoarding hogged the foreground.

Down the street from the temple, a white lady had discovered a better opportunity. Under the noonday sun, in the summer’s heat, Halebid’s women had lined the entire embankment on the town’s side of the Dwarasamudra tank that the Hoysala built nine-hundred years ago. They were doing their daily chore of washing the clothes of all the ones at home. There were enough colors and depth and width to challenge all the cameras on the white lady’s person—she had three of them, I think. Her only problem was the harsh noon-light, but she seemed to know how to handle it, so intense was her focus. I wanted that picture, too, but I hadn’t the courage to raise my camera at women who had lifted their dress to the knee, and were quite wet. So I went a distance on the bund and took aim with my Leica X1 with its 24 mm fixed lens and got no color and no story in any of my many shots.

I turned left and a vision of the splendor of the place when it was a capital appeared to me under the blazing sun. There, across this lake, on the promontory, the thin veneer of trees dissolved to reveal the Hoysaleswara Temple and, behind it, the Jain temples, and next to the Jain temples, by the lake shore again, the Kedareshwara Temple. Behind the temples, near the Royal Bath, the Hoysala’s Grand Palace floated in rarefied air, but the man-made lake that lay before me began to glitter and I blinked and blinked and fell back to my time.

There isn’t an outlet that serves a decent cup of coffee in Malnad. The little shops that make it use instant-coffee powder; but if you are desperate for good coffee, knock on the door of the coffee-planter. His woman will serve it with a fluff of froth with a wee bit of powder on top, in a cup larger than for espresso, smaller than for cappuccino. Fine South Indian coffee, the very best cafe au lait in the world. The coffee planter is a friendly guy, and immensely hospitable. Go on, knock boldly. It is possible he’ll also treat you to some akki-rotti. The real problem is how to reciprocate on his scale in your turn.

That is how you get good coffee in Malnad, where almost all Indian coffee is grown. Of course, the planter would rather spend the evening with you, to share with you some good whisky.

But it has been a bad winter for him. It rained on consecutive days for a week in December and ruined a promising crop across the belt; weeds have sprung at the feet of coffee and the berries cannot be gleaned (on a decent scale) from the chaos on the ground; in the meantime the rain has confused the plants and they have sprouted white blossoms in odd patterns and on random patches of plants. The planters are woebegone in all the three coffee districts, Coorg and Hassan and Chikmagalur.

Last week I went to Angadi from Sakleshpur, arriving where the narrow road splits into three, at which point you know you have arrived even if you miss the unmissable large sign: there is a stone tablet at the base of a large dried tree on the edge of the cross, rooting the place to antiquity. If you have come looking for Angadi, your turn is left, and you go a hundred meters up in the shade of the line of trees that flank you, and you come upon the mounds that you’ve come for, which hold the relics from the time of the founding of the Hoysala dynasty, from ten centuries ago.

The first Hoysala with detailed records to his name was Nripakama. He ruled from Angadi. He began a mere hill chief, but he packed the audacity to attack the Chola, the Chalukya, and a powerful neighbor, all of whom defeated him. But he displayed such valor as to win respect in his region, and yet not ruffle the emperors of the north and the south. The defeats did not deter him. Soon he attacked Banavase, the capital of the Kadambas down south from him in the plains. He won. By 1047, the year of his death, he was lord of an area large enough to be called a kingdom and commanded an army of hardy people, and both fell to his son Vinayaditya to extend.

Vinayaditya ruled a long time, so his son and grandsons were martially active with him while he ruled. Vinayaditya’s son Ereyanga, together with Ereyanga’s son Vishnuvardhana, went far north and torched the city of Dhara for the Chalukya, whose feudatory the Hoysala had become. Ereyanga would scourge three more cities, all before he himself became king. By the time Vinayaditya died, father and son and grandson had established a good sized kingdom, the nucleus of the major empire that the kingdom was to become within the next one-hundred years. Vinayaditya moved the capital away from Angadi on these ghats to Dorasamudra in the plains, a short distance away.

Why did the Hoysala’s sword—and the torch—travel only so far? His nemesis would arrive from such a distance. Did our peninsula, sealed by mountains, box our heroes within it? Were they denied the big bold dreams the grand terrain of Central Asia gave the Turkic men?

In Angadi, the monuments are small, and attest that what happened here was only a beginning. There are rises all round, hemmed in by coffee plantations. On the first rise I saw a modern temple and turned back. In a short while I was before two rises on either side of me. The one on the right had three Hindu temples on it, on which men from Hampi are working to a plan to restore them in three years. The rise on the left had a Jain basdi on it, its restoration quite advanced, the thirthankaras already standing in its garbha. Perhaps there are big plans for this small temple, now in the charge of Dharmasthala: the plan for this temple also extends three years.

If you’ve come searching for Angadi, you have the story of Sala in mind. The men on this site didn’t know where Sala performed his feat. A schoolboy who now tagged along with me didn’t know either. I drove back down the street and continued further, to the school, on another rise, broad like a short wide table. They were teaching on a Saturday, and in the classroom which I passed the teacher asked what happened in a substance (I didn’t hear the name) if four electrons fused with a single electron. His class gave him a rousing answer, all in chorus. In the next room I saw a dozen computers, of HCL, new under plastic hoods, and thought, maybe now, after ten centuries, the mind of even the commoner in Malnad is no more boxed, not by sea, nor by mountain, and who among these young—with the world open and inviting—might soar to the heights of a Chandrashekar or an Amartya Sen?

The teachers didn’t know either, where Sala had performed his brave feat. But they were helpful. One went into the library and returned with the monumental Kannada Vishwakosha, and found for me the short entry on Angadi. We read it, but it didn’t tell where it happened. Where did Sala kill the tiger? They directed me back to the new temple, the one I’d first skipped.

It is new only on the outside. The deities in it are female, with round, mother’s faces. They are of mud, and are ten centuries old. Sometime in their life someone has glazed their faces into a smooth-china finish, any woman’s envy. The rakshasa’s head is at the feet of Vasanthaparameshwari in the center; next to her, Varahi is on her haunches, and she has a sow’s sweet face—the only such face on a goddess that I’ve seen.

They are vanadevate-yaru, goddesses of the forest. In their early life they sat in the open, with the jungle canopy their shelter, and this, when it was an open spot, according to the priest, was the gurukul of Sala, where his Jain guru threw him the staff, and the exhortation, Hoy! Sala!

With that staff Sala killed the tiger that had come upon them, and gave birth to a name, and a dynasty.

In my last post I told you that all the public walls of Bangalore are painted over with scenes of ruins of our historical monuments, and larger-than-hoarding depictions of our beasts and birds and beaches. I am sitting in the Cafe Coffee Day by the highway at Hirisave, a hundred and ten kilometers west of Bangalore, and I see that the exhortations in Bangalore to celebrate the past of Karnataka are succeeding, and Bangalore is emptying itself this Christmas weekend, and in the process local tourism is shaking off a sluggish year. I am on my way from Hassan to Bangalore, and though it was the other lane that was full, and my lane was free, I am cross, because the cars from the other lane were spilling to ours and surging into us and drove us off the road a few times. Two fresh accidents were proof of the risk, but the sight of them was affecting no one.

This cafe is normally two tables full, but when we came in today only one table was free, with the leftovers from the last party littered on it. Brown and chocolate cake were smeared on the couches and the cushions, and fliers lay about, selling New Year celebrations at the Serai in Chikmagalur. The floor was full of crumbs and I kicked around to tidy it a little, and saw that cake crumbs are stubborn—they stay put or they stick to the shoe.

The tourists who have filled this cafe and the highway are headed to the ghats, to rest there among the quiet coffee, and to trek into the forests, there to turn inward; none may miss a visit to the monuments built by the Hoysala dynasty over four centuries, beginning tenth century, AD.

The Hoysalas began as men of the hills, of the thick jungles that matted the hills. They were virile, industrious, fired by a vitality that their environs imparted to them—qualities which they put to use to prey on traders carrying merchandise to the plains from the sea, or offer the traders protection against other forest brigands. Their other profitable occupation was to swoop down to the plains on marauding excursions, and bring home pillaged grain and stolen women.

Then, as now, these plains were irrigated by small reservoirs. Every few minutes on the road on these plains you notice a reservoir, which have provided water for centuries, to peasants under the Hoysalas, under the Turks, under the Vijayanagar kings, under British rule, and now to peasants in our socialist democratic republic. The plains were created by clearing the plateau of trees, and at the time we are discussing now, the clearing covered areas of today’s districts of Hassan, Mysore, and Tumkur.

click to enlarge…

In time, the plainsmen began to employ the hill-folk for protection of plainsmen from plainsmen in dispute, or for protection from man-eating tigers and leopards. They began to civilize a little, and came under the influence of Jain preachers. In the meantime, they began also to feel the need for protection for themselves, on account of uncertainties spawned by the wars between the northern and southern and eastern kingdoms. The fittest among the brigand chiefs emerged their leader, and the brigand-turned-ruler began to collect taxes from the plains—the brigand had become king.

It was a favorable time for the king who’d just begun his career. There appeared a period of calm when the surrounding kingdoms did not pose much trouble, and lesser kings offered their daughters in marriage. In that time of calm he consolidated a kingdom, and, shortly after, became a feudatory of the Chalukyas who ruled north of him.

Thus did the brigand chiefs from the Western Ghats rise to kingship. Just then, in the mid-East, the golden age of Islam had commenced, and the Turks had directed their ambitions eastward to India, and had begun a march that would in four centuries bring them to the Hoysala. In those four centuries, the Hoysalas would extend their kingdom to cover much of the peninsula, wrest sovereignty from the Chalukyas, change their faith from Jainism to Vaishnavite Hinduism, reach glorious heights in art and architecture and literature.

The Turks would go over treacherous mountain-passes to the northern plains of India; they would conquer Delhi and turn southward and come over the Sahyadri mountains to the Deccan plateau, and subdue the feuding southern kingdoms. The last Hoysala would fall to the Turk.

Today, we have only the temples from that time, apart from a public bath, some basic structures, and many tall stone-tablets (virgals) that are the records of the time. The virgals are in temples and also in remote places in the plains and in the jungles, across the vast stretch of the old kingdom, where they stand alone, bearing their fading stories on them. The temples are unarguably superb achievements, not so much for scale as for craftsmanship. But there is not one palace that has survived, not one house of a nobleman, or merchant, or commoner. Was there a secretariat? There isn’t a sign of it. Only the temples exist.

That is where they are headed, all these tourists.
——————————————
Here’s the blog of a young backpacker who has often been to the places of the Hoysalas.

Also, Payaniga’s Belur photo.

The ride into town

Turn right to the north on NH-48 and then at the square which comes up turn left to the west. The road (Bangalore-Mangalore Road) goes straight and curves fine to the right after a while, and then it is straight again for the few furlongs into the town center. On either side of the street are restaurants and small hotels and movie halls, all in the unimpressive style of small-town buildings in India. There is no attempt at architecture, but at a short distance north of the road a large pergola of a new building is visible which leads one to suspect that change is coming. Hassan is a small town of only 300,000 people, a town dilated in the fashion of a leaf on two sides of this road which runs like the midrib of the leaf.

I’ve been to a show in one of those movie halls. There were enough mosquitoes in the full hall for each one to have their own private swarm to torment them, but when the movie commenced and the Telugu burst forth at peak volume over the proudly advertised audio system, no one cared about the mosquitoes: the star was Shriya Saran, and with Rajanikanth’s voice at that heightened effect that all desired, everyone put up with every suffering with no effort at all, ignored even the smell of sweat and the moist heat and cool that blew at us from hefty noisy fans on the side walls.

Among the hotels and cinema theaters are the small shops which sell liquor legally in bottles, and illegally in glasses for drinking on the spot, there at the counter. Men throng the counters from noon, buying those spirits that cost the least and kick the senses the most, drinking liquor and dreaming mutton-chops. Mutton they get only on special days, such as when a goat is cut down during festivals. Other days they’ve to make do with yellow little balls of fried lentil-flour laced with red chilly powder and mixed with oily roasted peanuts, a mixture which assures the eye that it will finish the job on the system that the cheap liquor has begun.

The Hotel Ashhok comes up a while after the last bar is passed; it is the hotel where I always stay. If we pass the hotel and go straight on we are in seconds in the town square, at which point, last year, they sliced down the shop-fronts deeply so as to widen the road and, for some time now, they have a wide space and not yet a real road. The road runs further a wee bit and splits into three narrow streets: the turn left leads to Sakleshpur and continues to Mangalore. We may take the straight road ahead and lose ourselves in muddy market streets lined with stores that sell farm equipment and fertilizers and pesticides and tools and implements and also the harvest of the farms. They are tiny shops, but they are at the core of this agrarian district.

Hassanamba, the Smiling Goddess

From there it is a circuitous path to the Hassanamba Temple. The easiest description for me is to say that it is in the middle of that maze, in the sharp north-west corner of a wide yard that appears suddenly, unanticipated among those tight streets. The goddess Hassanamba—the smiling goddess—gives Hassan its name, and so that is what Hassan means: the divine smile! The temple has existed from around 1100 AD, and now inside its walls in the courtyard today’s plebeian painter—with the approval of his modern master, the civil servant—has struck cheap loud paint on old stone columns sanctioned by the royalty of antiquity, and he has worked on walls which are a millennium old, and on the carvings on columns, on Hanuman and other divinities, and turned powerful gods into comic characters.

The columns are round the twin to the Hassanamba Temple which is right before it, called the Siddeswara Temple. The smiling goddess is here a hutta, an anthill. Some readers may not know, but some of our anthills are often taken by snakes, sometimes by cobras, and the cobras are very important divinities to us and, because we cannot see which anthill has a cobra in it, we revere each hutta that we encounter. We have a festival for the huttas, on which day we pour milk into the hutta for the cobra to drink. The hutta which denotes Hassanamba in this temple is actually goddess Parvathi bearing another name. Parvathi is the wife of Shiva, the god of destruction, a fierce god, terrible in his wrath, but most adorable in stone. Siddeswara is one other name for Shiva, another form of him.

The Hassanamba Temple is open for but two weeks yearly at the time of Deepavali and is shut the day following Balipadyami. When they close the temple, they keep before the goddess a lit lamp, about two seers of uncooked rice, and water, and flowers. When the temple is opened the following year, the rice is cooked and good to eat, the lamp is still burning, and the flowers of last year are fresh with morning dew on them. I told you of the mess in the courtyard, but ten centuries of worship by millions of devotees have suffused even hard stone with divine tanmatras and the feeling at the time of leaving the temple is light, and the heart is full once more with hope and optimism and the resolve to do good.

All that meat and …

In Hassan they produce as much potatoes as meat. Maybe more, and maybe Louis Armstrong would’ve liked that. They are serious here about agriculture, which you can tell by the vast cultivated greens that cover the district, and also by the radio broadcast in the morning that comes through the speakers at the District Stadium, on the best methods to grow ragi or sunflower or rice. The stadium is reached walking straight north for fifteen minutes from the gate of the Hassan Ashhok, and this week when I joined the walkers and joggers the topic was about growing uddinabele. The young ones in the stadium were engrossed in themselves, and I couldn’t tell if the older ones were listening, but a good several of the men I passed (or who passed me) were speaking of gains from this crop and losses on the other, of buying a tiller or bolstering a bund, of loaning some pipes and losing two valves.

I’m thinking of a man who sat behind me at the lobby lounge in the hotel, who looked like a foreigner, whose voice was curdled and extra masculine in the Louis Armstrong fashion, and confident and deliberate. He had three men before him and he told them he has been in the coffee business for forty-five years. After a while he told them he is an Anglo Indian, that his relatives have all migrated to Australia and England, and his wife cannot take plantation life any more and has settled in Mangalore. He spends his evenings alone in the plantation bungalow and watches sports on television. His drink is brandy and his sport was rugby.

The following morning I asked the reception for his name. They gave me also his number. I’m going to meet him when I next go to Hassan. If his story is as exciting as I suspect, I’ll tell it to you.

See also: Why did you come here?

Their meal is a mess on the plate and a mess round the mouth—the kids seem to like what they are eating. For the smallest children the ayahs squeeze the morsels dry in their hands and push them into the mouths, a child at a time, patiently drawing them back from constant distraction. This creche is on a ledge on a slope; Ganesh (General Manager, Kadamane Estate) is attempting afforestation on the higher level, which is filled with young trees in tree-guards; down below a stream rolls lengthwise as it flows, being full from extra-heavy rain—it has fractured the small but sturdy wooden bridge which was upon it, whose planks now drift back and forth, loosely tethered and resigned to a new purposelessness. Some kids have not come to the creche today, not wanting to take the long route.

A couple of those children are from Assam, from where fifty workers have arrived with families this year. Ganesh says if they live without regret through this year’s rains, they’ll settle in Kadamane. Like the men I met before coming to this creche: Krishnan, 81, and Devaraj, 74, who both came from Kancheepuram to Kadamane, around 1955. Their eyes throw me a challenge when I ask them about the tasks they’ve performed on the plantation, as though they are equal to every task even now, and their bearing is of men who have never disdained work. I asked them if Kadamane had been a good career for them. “Anyone who speaks ill of Kadamane will starve to death,” Devaraj said. The two men found their wives here, put also their sons to work in Kadamane, and retired in Kadamane, and are living in the estate accommodation given their sons. I asked them about snakes, if they’ve heard of a tiger killing anyone in their years here, or if they’ve ever encountered a cheetah. Their faces were blank; they had no exciting story for me; or maybe they didn’t want to tell, and when their General Manager tried to help through asking questions in Tamil, that coaxed from them the mention of an old lady who went into the forest three years ago and never come back.

They go to Kancheepuram once a year and rush back, unable to bear its heat.

Their grandsons? They considered their General Manager before they answered this, but only briefly: “The estate cannot offer jobs equal to their education. They are employed in Bangalore.” I am surprised at the easy relationship between the top man and his workmen. (That afternoon, in Ganesh’s office, I watched a union representative argue with him for better blankets. While Ganesh heard him the muscles on his face went low and settled, giving him a nonplussed, vulnerable look, elderly, drawing trust. The union man left accepting the task to consider paying a portion of the cost of the blanket.)

In the morning, while waiting for Ganesh and the old men, I walked on a tea patch, where about fifty women were plucking tea. I came upon a well-dressed man: Thomas, Field Officer. I asked him that only a fraction of the vast spread of Kadamane was being developed, about the difficulty in attracting labor, and about the disincentives in plantation work. He asked the women to fetch some leeches, and they found a couple in seconds: leathery little things: one tiny, the second, bloated. He told how they spring to any height of you, and of places where they sometimes lodge—in the nostrils, in the eye! I shuddered, mindful now of every orifice than ever before. He spoke of cobras, which workmen never kill; and vipers, which are the color of the tea-leaf and which can strike you anywhere from ankle to chest depending on where they are when encountered. He showed how thick they are by forming a ring with his thumb and forefinger: about an inch and a half. How long? He stretched out his arm and held its elbow with the other hand : about a foot and a half. I looked hard into the masses of bush to discern the shape of the snake but saw only leaf. I rooted myself a safe number of feet from the moss-covered stem-branches.

He praised his management. They have a school on the plantation; a temple, a mosque (which I didn’t see), and two churches; a medical center. They offer scholarships to promising youngsters, even if the likelihood is that the beneficiaries will not return to work here. Who will work in these harsh conditions, when Bangalore beckons? I noticed then that the logo on his jacket was of a major private hospital in Bangalore. Thomas has been employed in Kadamane for twenty-eight years.

When I headed out from the creche, the head of the ayahs was washing out the toilet, flooding it. It was very wet and thoroughly clean. I took a last look at the kids, well fed, and well loved. And well located, among hills and woods and streams and in abundant clean air. I felt it wrong to think where they’d later go for jobs, but I couldn’t help the thought that they weren’t being raised for here. I could sense the snare that is already flung for them, from Bangalore and beyond.

In such a vast panorama only a fifth—maybe tenth—of the land is filled with trees. The rest is taken by thigh-high, chest-high cones of the shrub. The shrubs in a given patch are all trimmed to the same height and, seen level, seeing the height they have climbed and the depths they’ve plunged, they are a rollicking green ocean, especially choppy now during the monsoons. It is a flat-topped shrub, deep green, whose stem-branches are twisted and covered in green moss. There are hundreds of acres of them, falling away before me, rising on the hills on my left, on the hills on my right, up the hills ahead, and everywhere behind me. Only a few gaunt trees stand among the shrub, planted to a plan for just-so-much shade—the stubborn strands on pates gone bald. On the crests of hills the trees are lush and thick, like hair on the punk’s head.

I have spent an hour and a half walking in the creases between tea patches and then I have climbed back up to the bungalow and am sitting on the ledge that frames the front steps. I am wet: my large sturdy umbrella was blown out several times while I worked the camera and I failed to manage the two and yet remain dry. Behind me the bungalow is in darkness: the power-supply has been halted by rain. The wind is whistling and hissing in and around the bungalow, and on the hilltops it is taking the trees every way, pushing and pulling them, ravishing them, and they grind together, and heave, and reach a crescendo of movement and a voluptuous roar erupts from them that shakes this world, after which the wind collapses, and the trees with it, and they rest a while before the next bout.

The rain comes pouring and stays and comes back again. Ganesh (the General Manager of Kadamane Estate) was confident when he told me that Agumbe has lost its status to Kadamane, that it now receives the highest rainfall, four-hundred inches last year.

In a cusp between the farthest hills there is a silver glow that is now covered, now uncovered. Columns of flat cloud the height of hills move stealthily on the right, as though wishing not to interrupt the lovemaking all round. Each column is like a diaphanous side-screen in a giant theater: they flutter as they move one behind the other in a long line in which the start and the end are merged with the hills in front and the hills behind. They walk on the tea without being a weight on them. I expect that they will tear up when the next rain comes, but no, they are there, their line unbroken, walking on, now seeming like thin tall furtive ghosts.

When the rain commences it is a patter on the roof, then a beating on it, and soon a lashing everywhere. The pouring is intense and blinding in the distance on the hills—the wind, the rain, and their insistent sound move with pressing urgency, curving round and away, traveling far, curling quickly back, touching the tea and the trees and the hills and everything between them, making up for all the time they’ve been away. The pouring ends abruptly and silence takes its place—the tea sparkle, the trees lift, and the hills sizzle. But there is a sound now, which does not rob the silence, the sound of water gushing everywhere, in grooves and gutters, falling from the roof, gurgling down the steep slopes, gaining volume, growing louder and louder as it goes. I think of the water-falls in the bends of the tracks, and the muscular streams, and the swollen red river that I saw earlier when Ganesh took me on a tour of the plantation.

Darkness has begun to fall, and I take a last look at the glowing mist that has filled the trees and capped the hills. It is as though a cold white heat has rimmed the world. Abruptly, darkness falls. There is no moon, there are no stars—only sound, but I haven’t heard a single bird all evening. The lights have come on in the bungalow; it is time to go in.

The fire before me has been burning since five. I read Kapuscinski’s account of the civil war in Angola in 1975. The FNLA and UNITA have converged on Luanda in multiple columns from the north and the south. The MPLA have begun to mobilize the whole population for the decisive battle for the newborn nation. A chapter remains, to know who won, and the reportage is terrific, and I finish the book and learn that everyone lost in the Angolan War even if the MPLA won it that November. The play of rain and wind is unabated outside, but it settles in a quiet corner in my mind. Later, when I pull the sheets over me, the sounds come back to the fore: the continual whoosh outside, the roaring in the far woods that won’t stop. The thought comes to me that this building where I’m sleeping might be blown away tonight, but in a few seconds deep sleep has engulfed me and my fears. I’ve breathed so much fresh air, no dreams come.

Right of us, across the street, an ambulance bobbed about like a dead beetle borne on a mass of ants undecided on the right route. Its wail was wimpish and, eventually, when things cleared, it came to life and made toward the Forum Mall and the bikes and the cars went lurching with it, squeezing into the space by its sides, jutting ahead of it, tailgating it in the hope of stealing some speed. Traffic was particularly bad Tuesday this week, even if the rain that confounds Bangalorean traffic only teased from above and never fell.

On Sunday we saw big others brought to submission, at the elephant camp by the Cauvery. The elephants carried weekenders on short rounds, dragging their feet, halting and heaving every few moments, saying in many ways that they wanted out. The humans atop the elephant—some nervous, some squealing—and the ones on the ground who gazed and and clicked away at the chained elephants accepting football-sized food-balls that the maavuts tossed throw-ball-style over sagging lower-lips, everyone, it seemed, loved the elephant. The question was: Who would be their friend?

Every day, after feeding, the elephants are taken a half-hour into the forest and let loose there. They are then free to roam, and forage, and do the things they can, now after the wild is plucked out from them. In the evening the maavuts return and search for them, like shepherds. We went with them till where they were freed, walking with Ajeya, a handsome fellow yet unconquered, even after six months with the maavuts—because the memory of the wild has not left him altogether, which his taut ears tell, and the tension in the brow, and his eyes, and occasional ominous exhalations. Vijaya and Basavaraj are his maavuts; last week they had an incident with him.

They were riding him when a young one came in at them for play. Ajeya didn’t know this kind of a game offered by a tamed one and after a while became nervous and shook off the two young men seated on him and started to run. After some distance, none can tell why, he turned and, seeing his keepers on the ground, came bounding after them. His sight focused on Vijaya, much frailer of the two, and he began to assault him with his trunk but the other maavuts came soon enough and Vijaya was saved.

The bruises were as though from yesterday on Vijaya’s shins. His left ankle was swollen. He limped, but his smile came easily despite the pain, and when narrating the incident, he assigned the cause for that day’s terror and this enduring pain only to that young elephant that came at Ajeya. Toward Ajeya he feels only indulgence.

Our maavuts were jenu-kurubas, and Ajeya—named by the foresters—is Ajjayya to them, god and protector of their community. He is on the rowdy-sheet for killing three men, so they went after him and took him in six months ago. How do you train a rogue elephant? “There are spots in them which when you handle make the roughest beast a cow.” It is a terrible process to watch, they told us, the beast resisting every moment of the long time it takes, and the screams rent the earth.

Ajjayya has been trying to break free: there are inch-deep wounds beneath the chains which have cut through his armor-skin. His maavuts carried bottles of oils which they slapped on the wounds and gave a rubbing round the wounds. Then they wiped their hands on his sides and on his cheeks and down his eyes until they were dry—Ajjayya is slowly beginning to accept their love. Soon he will accept the two men completely and will then be theirs. Each elephant will answer only to his maavut; a maavut approaches another’s elephant most anxiously.

During the workweek in Bangalore I sat in a serene boardroom with a businessman who proposed a strategic alliance. He began his presentation not from when he founded his company, but from where he was born: in a village six kilometers from Sitamahi, where Rama’s Sita was born. “A temple can be built there first”, he said, “there is no dispute there, unlike in Ayodhya.” I looked into his eyes. They were placid, and they testified that there weren’t more meanings to the things he said. His village is situated where the ancient kingdom of Mithila was, which King Janaka ruled, whose daughter Sita he gave to Rama. The businessman’s mother-tongue is Mythili. “We are very near Nepal; but of course there was no Nepal then; everything was India.” He challenged my secular mind with his pleasant grace, and then I realized I should respect his sacred context, and the beatific Hindu past of his imagination which is the backdrop to his thought—I must think upon it.

We walked along the golf course to a restaurant near his office, in a five-star hotel, empty of foreigners, and only two tables taken. I worked hard to be polite and gracious as him.

The week has ended and my mind has drifted to that night last month when at midnight when I stood on the Galata Bridge and watched the Topkapi Palace floating high in a cradle of yellow light. There were a few people on the bridge—one of them a woman—catching small fish with long rods even at that hour. I am overwhelmed by a need to go quickly and lose myself in some place just as far.

Years ago, I often shuttled with my parents between Bangalore (and Mysore) and Mangalore, and crossed the coffee-belt midway. In all my memories I peer through the trees of the plantations from the rear window, always through mist or rain or the dark, looking for the fabled estate-mansions. I saw my first plantation-homes these last years, after acquiring a profession and having gone grey—the mist has thinned and their mystery has vaporised. But the magic of my imagining returns if I peer through time to beyond a hundred years ago, where the mists are thicker, and in their haze are brave men from six-thousand miles away, seeking fortune and adventure in the jungles of Malnad.

Men like Middleton. He came to Munzerabad (Tipu’s Sakleshpur) from Ceylon, after three years of growing coffee there. An officer took him to the virgin ghats and told him to take the jungle from this hill to that, and from that hill there to this hill here for no tax at all, but to remit quarter of the earnings to the government. Middleton founded the Kaadumane Estate there. When he had succeeded to his satisfaction, it was time to take a wife, and he went to England to fetch one, and brought her to Kaadumane on an ox-cart, arriving at night. In the morning, her first day at her Indian home, his bride went out and saw yesterday’s oxen were today two bloody carcasses, devoured by a tiger before dawn!

To sense that past, I went with Nagegowda’s Bettadinda Battalige to the Munzerabad Club, established in 1893 by white planters, for white people. Ramachandra, its president today, is a lean, fit, reticent, classical planter with modern problems, worrying what to do with the horn-bearing skulls of wild game that gazed upon us while we chatted about the times when they were hunted down. He brought Subbanna, past-president, member since 1951, seventy-nine years of age but alert through every peg, and brimming with memories of drinks shared and graces experienced with English gentlemen in the years immediately after Independence.
Morning, I sat on the raised verandah with a breeze pleasant on the skin but pungent in the nostrils, the air spiked with mine-dust from the lorries of Bellary which run all day through the main street of Sakleshpur. The rains had brought down the temperatures.

The sun was easy on the eye and his light danced off the leaves. Ramachandra had arranged for Basanna (past president), and Karthik, the young honorary secretary-successful planters-to show me the minutes of meetings from the 1900s.

Extraordinary men-Crawford, Radcliffe, Young, Middleton (junior)-have signed notes on ordinary affairs: missing cutlery, the minimum whiskey that should be stocked, other such matters. In profession, and in causes espoused, each man’s story is a potential bestseller. Lt. Col. Crawford came to India when he was eighteen with his brother, seventeen. They arrived in Madras, boarded a train to Bangalore, then to Mysore, and travelled by ox-cart to Hassan. The eighty-mile journey to Hassan took five days, and Crawford has narrated remembrances not of hardship suffered but of kindness received from the two gowdas who drove their ox-cart.

Moving on to Munzerabad, the Crawfords established themselves as major planters, and built a reputation as benevolent masters: when clearing the jungles for coffee, they first cleared areas for workmen’s quarters; they brought clean water down from the hilltop through pipes for their workmen; the nearest hospital being miles away, they arranged a minimal dispensary on the plantation. Crawford has claimed he has no recollection of ever having quarreled with a workman.

Their business expanded and their largesse grew. East of Munzerabad Club, the Crawford Hospital is even today Sakleshpur’s largest. Similarly, Crawford donated land for the Central Coffee Research Institute in Balehonnur in Chikmaglur. In Mysore, the University Offices have for decades been housed in stately Crawford Hall. The old school west-side of Munzerabad Club bears the name of its patron, E H Young.

What did the club mean to them? I asked in Bangalore: Ms Shelagh Foster, as sprightly today as one seven-decades younger, who has reared horses in Malnad and Bangalore, whose late husband came after his education to join his father in the plantation business in Munzerabad, remembers the parties, such as the racing party when they took the horses up to the Munzerabad Fort and raced them on the downs.

It rained and everyone was soaked. They descended to the club and changed and distributed prizes there, and the men retired to the bar and the women went into the lounge, as was their routine.

There were movie nights. Lots of tennis. And rarely, there were drunken nights.

Subbanna has heard of one such night from before his time: Three English bachelors rode into the club one day and were drunk by evening. To go higher, they climbed the the billiards table and began a game from on high: more drinks were downed, and after each round they hurled the glasses to the walls; some rounds, they emptied the drink on the butler’s head, asking while pouring, “do you like it?” When they finished their drunken sport and rode out, dawn was already upon them.

A note in the minutes is probably related to this incident: it refers to “senseless damage” which the committee “deprecated,” and for punishment all those present were asked to pay a fine. While determining the penalty, the committee noted that the billiards table was in need of repair even before the incident.

Subbanna also offered a respectful remembrance of an Englishman’s Sundays at the club. He’d come in the morning, check into one of the four rooms the club had then. He’d order a high-breakfast to the room. And a double brandy. “Don’t disturb me hereon, I’m reading,” he’d instruct the butler. No lunch was arranged for him, only high tea. When the butler went up with high tea, the double brandy would be sipped only just. At dinner, he’d ask the butler to pour out the brandy. Subbanna is struck by the elegance of all this.

After a point, miffed that I’d strayed too long, the future pulled me round, his hand hard on my shoulder.
What did the planters I met foresee for Malnad? Young labour has left for the city. Many planters’ children have gone where the Crawfords and the Schofields came from, and are exercising there the enterprise that white men showed in Malnad. Schooling children are sent to Bangalore and Mysore with the wives so that eventually, these children will go westward too. So? With senior citizens as owners and workmen, is the coffee-belt set to buckle? Who are the innovators who possess the enterprise and the ambition of the pioneers?

Ramachandra and I went to Anand Pereira’s plantation. Pereira begins and ends his workday zen-fashion, meditating by a high tank teeming with Japanese koi: the sprawl of his estate is on full display from the tank.
Through inventive irrigation and the use of his scholarship in microbiology, he has created one-hundred and twenty acres of springy soil that support a fine-looking coffee plantation: “Feel the soil, Shashi! Feel it!” And, worried about the warming, he is creating a canal system to prevent the earth from cracking, should famine strike. “No time, Shashi! No time!” He walks faster as he says this, as though to create time.

We finished the tour late-afternoon and sat with his wife and watched their children play cricket with the farm-hands on the kana. Suddenly Pereira asked me: “What can planters learn from manufacturing, Shashi?”
With trees looming round us, there was such silence in that womb in which we sat, except for children scoring and denying runs, and prayers welled up in me for his success, for success for all planters, prayers that were, in truth, utterly selfish.

The first signs in this season of harvest are disappointing. Harsh rains have felled coffee beans, which were red and ready for picking. So earnings will be poor this year in the coffee belt. But the disappointment did not show at the Planters Club where three hundred people from the planter community assembled to celebrate its Silver Jubilee last week.

They’d asked me graciously (and earnestly) to arrive in time for the group photograph. I arrived in the nick but needed a bite of lunch. There were two others in the dining hall. The taller of them served himself a heap and went and sat erect at the only dining table in the hall, settling his plate by a tall glass full with lightened golden liquid—whisky at lunch? The other stayed parked at the buffet spread, plate in hand, and served himself small portions and ate standing right there, powdering the papads, taking the larger piece, letting the crumbs drop back into the dish-bowl. I sat on the line of plastic chairs that lined the wall opposite, and watched them, and though they were aware of me, they didn’t look at me. The man at the buffet coughed now and then and the two conversed without looking at each other. Then I saw what the man (blue shirt, thick grey mustache) sitting at the table was eating. Curds rice! It is not usual to drink whisky with curds rice here, where hard liquor is taken with meat and spice. It looked like whisky alright, and he took big swigs. He swayed when he rose, but only a little, and was soon steady—not bad for an old man drinking whisky at lunch.

The Silver Jubilee Lunch had officially ended and we were three latecomers scraping bottoms. Outside, they were gathering people for the group picture.

English was the stage language in this place where they speak unadulterated Kannada with ease and grace, and the surviving founders of the club reminisced in English about the days of creation of the Club. They were young men who had no place where to gather and enjoy snacks and drinks. Cars were rare. In a gathering in an uncomfortable place where they lacked even a bottle-opener for beer (and had to work their teeth) the germ of the idea popped up to have a club of their own.

Another senior finished his remembrances protesting the fate of the coffee grower: “In the thirties, in the United States, Roosevelt urged the farmer to stay on the farm.” Overcome by the sense of disparity between here and there, he thundered Roosevelt’s words: “I am with you!” Then he continued: “Our Indian government is ignoring our request for a mere seven-hundred and fifty crores for working capital.” He ended with: “These words aren’t for an evening like this. Let us enjoy!”

Each gent had been given three coupons with which to enjoy. Cheers! the coupons said. The coupon was currency for a large peg of the hard stuff. No coupons were handed to the women, who sat segregated, their section bright with their brilliant dresses. The fair skin of the women took the color of their dress and glowed. The segregation was misleading, because the sexes mingle freely in Malnad, and when I hear the women address the men (anna), or when the men call the women (akka), all with easy affection, my Kannadiga ears tingle with pleasure.

The women responded first to the Mangalorean master of ceremonies who worked hard to raise the spirit of his audience. The men managed their spirits on their own, leaving their seats and crowding the bar counters. Some men went further away, up the stairs to where the cars were parked, where they kept their glasses on tops of cars and talked. A cool breeze played about them and rustled the silver-oaks and the bottle-palms. I settled where the happenings on both levels could be experienced and savored the mood of the moment.

In the shamiana, men finally climbed on to the stage and began a game of clapping and saluting. I couldn’t comprehend the rules because my time was up and I was so sleepy, so I fumbled back through the maze of cars and went into my cottage and slept and woke up in the morning without having heard a single car leave in the night.

The cars left at two in the morning, Mahendra told me. Mahendra washes my car for me when I’m there. I thought of Nandeeshanna, whom I had to meet soon. Would he be awake after drinking and the dancing until two? Not possibly, I thought, but I called him. He was already in Ballupet and he asked me to go rightaway because he had to pick up his laborers for the day’s work and take them to his plantation on his own because his driver broke his leg some days ago. I’d forgotten that Nandeeshanna, like all serious planters, works all days of the year. I went immediately. There he was, clean and fresh and grinning, but a shade guilty. You retired very early, he complained in a nice way, attempting to absolve himself, for he was my host and my escort, and it was he who had persuaded me to attend the celebrations.

I told him I always retire early and that seemed to offer him some relief. All the ladies and all the men danced until two, he said. Come again for the New Year’s, you missed the best part yesterday!

I’ve told you about elephants that descend from the hills at night and visit the plantations in Malnad. A recent post of mine tells of the torrent of trucks from the mines of Bellary that has already ruined the Sakleshpur highway—soon the green on either side of the highway will be laid waste, when the ore-dust from the open trucks settles on leaf and soil and cakes them in a sickly red color.

Sometimes on this road, one encounters a different carrier of burden. This one was apparently well fed, and he carried only a small load: I followed him a good distance, and he walked peacefully on the left edge of the road. More often, one encounters an angry one who is poorly fed and overly worked. His keepers are wary when you ask if you may offer him some plantains, and you see the elephant steam and snort and take a step forward and a step backward and crook his giant leg and stamp and grunt and show in so many ways that he doesn’t appreciate his captivity, and the labor he is forced into. His walk to work is often long, and when he enters the villages on his route children and adults pour out from their homes shouting aane!, aane!, elephant!, elephant!, and stand and lovingly gaze at him till he is completely out of sight.

While trekking in Bhumthang in Bhutan some years ago, we asked our guide, a strapping Bhutanese, how to escape if we were to encounter a bear. He didn’t know. Sujaya remembered what someone had told her, that you should run in a wide zigzag, so as to beat the bear’s side vision. The bear can’t maneuver (so the theory) and will fall and roll down. We had laughed—what if it rolled down on you, and you went tumbling down together?

Now in Malnad, we’ve been asking people how to escape if we come upon elephants.

We ask because we see their large round footmarks in the tracks between the coffee; we see broken fences; dung; and some weeks ago, on a neighbor’s plantation, uncles and aunts and other elders of a baby elephant pulled out coffee for the baby to play with—they played a long time and they took good plants from two acres. I’ve not seen anger at the destruction the elephants cause though people do not conceal their fear. But, just once, Annaiah Gowdru, sitting in the back of my car, looked wistfully at a JCB earth-remover at work on a farm and wished to borrow it, to smack an elephant with it. “Chhe,” someone said, and all in the car had fallen silent.

Last week Nandeeshanna was taking us round his flawless plantation and we were admiring his rich green plants (no weed at at their feet, no kambada-chiguru on their stems, no disease in the leaves, the branches full of beans and limp from the weight) when his wife called and asked him to return home. It was only five but the light had waned. He obeyed her, though he said the elephants reach his plantation many hours after dusk, descending from a range of hills to the North-East of where we stood, trampling on the many plantations lying in their way from the hills to his estate. They say the elephants stick to the same path—set in their lifetime? In ancient times?

“Run,” is the only advice all have. Some agree that we should run zig-zag. If we’re in the car and their herd is crossing the road? “Switch on all the lights, blink continuously every light that can blink, and press and hold down the horn button.” I’m not so sure. If I were an elephant, I’d smash the car that’s being a nuisance in that fashion in the forest.

Nandeeshanna goes to the Planters Club on Sundays, where he permits himself some whisky and plays rummy until eleven. “I’ve asked him to stop,” his wife told us in his presence yesterday. Nandeeshanna is disciplined to a fault, so she has no fear of what his weekly rummy and whisky will do to him. She is afraid that the elephants will do him down at midnight.