by Christopher Key Chapple
In November 1981, I attended a conference in Cochin, Kerala, on the Malabar coast of southwest India. The journey was arduous; I flew twenty hours from New York to London to Kuwait to Dubai before arriving in Bombay. While in Bombay, I had time only for a shower before flying out to Cochin. The flight to Cochin was beautiful, low and close to the shore. From the air it looked uninhabited, and so lush: not a highrise hotel in sight, or even a summer home.
Arrival at Cochin Airport was utter chaos, or seemingly so to the uninitiated. The arrival building consisted of an aluminum roof supported by what appeared to be palm tree poles. A bevy of porters, none over five and a half feet tall, poured into the shelter, more than one for every passenger. Their aggression startled me and, being unaccustomed to a land where humans are hired to perform even the simplest of tasks, I defensively lugged my own bag out to a taxi.
By the time I arrived at the Biju Tourist Home, night had fallen, in its sudden, tropical way. I collapsed on the platform-and-foam bed, and dozed, only to wake up a short time later, sweating. Each night was a challenge in the south; I never slept more than a couple hours at a time, being besieged by mosquitos, confused by jet lag, and aroused at 4:30 a.m. by Hindu pandits singing their morning invocations.
The conference, unlike anything I have seen in America, provided a total environment, from 6:00 a.m. meditation with Swami Chinmayananda, a prominent Himalayan master and heir to Swami Sivananda, through three meals deliciously prepared by a team of Brahmins in a specially constructed kitchen, to Bharata Natyam of the Bhagavad Gita and Krishna’s exploits, performed by beautiful Keralease girls. In between these highlights, the conference took place, a coming together of Muslims, former Marxist officials, Hindu Sadhus, Christian priests, Scientologists, Tibetan monks, and Sikh social workers, to name just a few of the groups represented in the crowd of 300. Opinions flew freely, and the problem of mass conversions to Islam was a lively topic. One radical difference I noticed was that religion lives in India; everyone seemed to take their practice seriously.
On Thursday, we took a bus to Kalady, the birthplace of Sankara. During the trip, while crossing the bridge from Ernakulam to Wellington Island, I saw a dolphin jump out of the water. We drove for several kilometers, my first overland experience with the Indian countryside. At first it was a bit shocking. In town, the housing had been made of brick and stucco; although architecturally exotic, the concept was still familiar. Here, as we left Cochin, thatched roof huts predominated, melting from the roadway into a panoply of palm trees, mirrored by sparkling green rice paddies. At first it seemed almost too primitive, too pristine. But the unending streams of people were as clean as the town folk, the men sporting bright, buttoned polyester shirts with equally colorful sarongs which they continually fussed with, hitching them up above their knees and then letting them fall to the ground. The women, seen in fewer numbers and never with men, wore saris, though one young Keralese friend made the comment that more and more, they are dressing as men, in reference to an occasional flowing skirt and blouse. The people all seemed healthy and cheerful; I do not remember seeing one disfigured person in Kerala, and very few indigent ones.
The landscape dazzled with palm and cashew trees, rice paddies, and rolling hills. Yet, despite its agrarian character, there was no lack of educational facilities. Every kilometer or so appeared a school or college or technical training center. Furthermore, the absence of television made the people seem more literate than most Americans.
On our way to Kalady, we made two stops, both symbolic and informative. The first was at FACT Industries, which had sponsored our food on the previous day and had shown a slide show extolling the wonders of chemical fertilizers produced at FACT plants in Kerala. As we approached the plant, an aura of death enveloped the lush countryside. Niagara Falls genre odors seeped into the bus and I instinctively recoiled, recognizing the chemistry of Love Canal, near where my parents had once lived. We approached FACT and a valley of green looked grey, obscured by particle pollutants in the atmosphere. When I commented to one of the Kerala fathers about the density of the pollution, he replied blithely that fortunately no one lived in the area; the plant was far from any residences. As we neared the main plant, it became even more intense; my eyes burned and watered, my nose clogged up with sediment. The workers looked dirty and discouraged, unlike any I had seen prior. As we departed, a short distance from the compound, a series of apartments was being built – the three story, sturdy brick types found in Cochin, constructed largely (and slowly) by inexpensive female labor. Sure enough, it was housing for company employees, well within the umbrella of pollutants.
The second sight we saw on the way was indeed breath-taking: the largest Roman Catholic seminary in Asia. Our bus labored up a hillside, and down an enchanted lane lined with trees. Around the bend stood a magnificent Gothic structure overlooking the hills, perched high above the banks of the Periyar River. The river provoked in me a profound devotion which was repeated when I caught sight of the Ganges in Benaras as we traveled to hear Krishnamurti. While the others toured the church and the European-style classrooms, I ducked out a back door and located the steps – more than a hundred of them – which lead, ghat-like, down into the river. There, on a quiet and solitary pilgrimage, I washed my feet, hands, and face, feeling a stillness and intimacy. Then followed the long ascent; by the time I reached the chapel at the top of the embankment I was sweating profusely and feeling the full force of the tropical air. After a leisurely walk through the flower gardens I returned to the bus and we left our Shangrila. The seminary was obviously a showpiece moneyed by foreign sources, a subtle attempt at conversion by convincement. Yet it was so incongruous; the hulking gothic arches were a mere mockery in a country built of thatch and needing nothing any more substantial for comfort. How strange it must have seemed to the local folk when the project was begun several decades ago!
Finally, we reached our destination: Kalady. A magnificent seven story Hindu style monument – Sankara Tower – signaled our arrival. We drove on to the shrine, the supposed birthplace of Sankara. Of course, there were no ruins to see; the thatch over the wooden houses is changed every year and nothing remains from the eighth century. A marvelous cluster of low-lying temples has been built and is maintained by the Vedanta Society, including a pillar commemorating the birthsite, a shrine to an incarnation of Visnu (I don’t remember which one), and a walkway down to the Periyar. A Hindu priest gave me some red powder which I put on my forehead – many others had done the same – and we headed down for the river, this time on a different sort of pilgrimage. It had become something of a show with picture taking and all. I took some shots for a member of our entourage, who turned out to be an East German Lutheran Marxist now teaching in Madras who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Sankara. In the distance, a priest was telling the life of Sankara and giving a watered-down, neo-Hindu version of his Advaita Vedanta. We collected ourselves again and boarded the bus for our next destination, the Ramakrishna Advaita Ashram where I was scheduled to give a brief talk on yoga.
The Ashram was very austere and quite impressive. In the center of a spacious courtyard stood a huge serpent tree with lusciously fragrant flowers shaped like spotted cobras, each dangling what we were told was a Siva linga. (A Sikh friend later informed me that the species was imported from the South American Amazon.) In the shrine room, to the south of the tree, an alabaster Ramakrishna beamed serene blessings, though I must admit my impressions were more of an aesthetic than a spiritual nature. The monks served a delicious tea, and displayed several books for sale – all of which were familiar to me through Moksha Bookshop.
After a bit of socializing, we made our way across the road to a thatched-roof, open-air meeting hall. Darkness fell quickly; several of the Muslims went into the field for their sunset prayer. The remaining delegates gathered under the roof, and I joined our session’s President, Dr. Maria Lucker, European head of the World Conference of Religions for Peace, and two Vedanta Society swamis on the stage. The elder swami spoke first. I was a bit surprised; he was a retired businessman who had joined the order only a few years prior. He was followed by another swami, somewhat younger, who read a speech. Meanwhile, I was cued to speak for only ten minutes, a bit of a shock as I had prepared a half hour talk. I pared down my theme and delivered a summation of yoga, including such points as the five senses, the five elements, creative power of buddhi, and the need for jnana. It was quite well received, though the Indians were a bit startled to hear so many Sanskrit words from an American. Compared to the standard Vedantic message of the swamis, it seemed that Patanjali yoga was rather unique.
Having felt the elation and then the aloneness which follows a public talk, I rejoined the bus; in the darkness we returned to Cochin. We passed a torch-lit political gathering, complete with bull horns and chants. When I asked about it, my friend said that such activities were common, a far cry from the stuffy meetings of Republicans and Democrats which so few Americans have attended in this country. The bus was mainly filled with young Keralese, and they broke into Malayalam songs praising Kerala. As the bus lumbered through the narrow country roads, I looked out into the sky where equatorial Venus beamed twice as bright, and Orion, though at a different angle, served as a sparkling sentinel of the evening, a witness like myself to the unending dance of India. In the darkness I felt a quiet kinship with the land of my adopted spiritual heritage, savoring the pre-industrial darkness and its accompanying sense of solitude.
This one day was a cameo of India: ancient and modern, revered and corrupted. Both worlds, painful and free, exist in reciprocity, interrelating, continually creating.