DIARY
JEREMY ISAACS From snow in Suffolk to the coast of Coromandel — to get away from it all. There was only one board member of the Royal Opera House in the hotel. Madras, capital of Tamil Nadu, has opted recently for the Tamil name Chennal, but the British pres- ence is still evident at the fort. St Mary's church, 1682, would not be out of place in Kent. At Mahabalipuram there are fine gods and temples and elephants carved from vast granite monoliths for the Pallavan kings of the 8th century AD. I could not think of their Saxon equivalents. At Scannathpur, near Mysore, the 13th-century Hindu temple is a well-proportioned masterpiece of intricate carving in stone. Some of the carvings are rude, erotic. 'All part of life,' said our guide. Newspapers with breakfast: the Times of India, the Indian Express and the Hindu. The front pages are full of 'scams', allegations of corruption in high places in state govern- ment and in Delhi, running to billions of rupees — arms, cattlefeed, property. The current talking-point was whether the Prime Minister's office had instructed that no inves- tigations should commence into ministers' doings without his authorisation. The press reckoned that it had and ought not to have done. Nolan seemed pretty small beer by comparison.
It is impossible for the holidaymaker to do more than glimpse and guess at a nation's Political wellbeing, let alone a subcontinent's With a population of 950 million. This is a vastly fertile land of huge potential, but mil- lions live in poverty, better off homeless on the city streets than in the villages they leave behind. Illiteracy is still rife. Only 8 per cent pay income taxes. The power grid serving the entire north of the country, including Delhi, went down recently for two days. (A quarter of the supply is said to be illegally siphoned off, unpaid for, to pay political debts.) The United Front government is a coalition of a dozen parties, including Congress, which has lost its way. India needs strong leadership, but does not know where to find it. At a hos- pitable dinner table in Mysore, an able tech- nocrat, who had worked 20 years in the Unit- ed States, told us of the hopes he had of change when he returned to India ten years ago, and of his impatience today. He is going back to America, leaving behind, he reckons, `A people betrayed'. My single abiding image of India, though, is of the young, of the blues and greens and reds and browns of school uniforms everywhere. They deserve the best.
From the heat of the plains to Udaghamandalam, 6,000 feet up among the tea plantations in the Nilgiri hills — Ooty, as the Raj knew it. Here is is cool, chilly even, at night there are wood fires in the bedrooms. It was pleasant to wander through the botanical gardens laid out in 1847 by gardeners from Kew: 'Do not pluck the flowers, climb the slopes, play on the lawn'; or among the gravestones of St Stephen's church: 'Finished and opened for Divine Service on Easter Sunday, 3 April 1831, John James Underwood, Captain, Madras Engineers, Architect'. Memorial plaques pay tribute to the men and women of the army and the Indian Civil Service; to a Master of the Ootacamund Fox Hounds, and an officer drowned while out with them; to the vicar of this congregation, who had served six years as a missionary to the heathen.
The Portuguese had Cochin, on the Malabar coast, before the Dutch; Vasco da Gama was buried here at St Francis's church in 1524. And the Dutch were here before the British. So St Francis was Catholic, Dutch Reform, Anglican and now, in turn, Church of South India. There is a lively Christian presence in this cos- mopolitan seaport which has traded in rice and spice for centuries. Fishing boats and gaily painted lorries — 'Sound Horn, Don't Kiss Me' — are proudly named Jesus and Mary and The Lord is my Shepherd Psalm xxiii I. At the gaudy Basilica of Santa Cruz, a wedding, complete with professional video crew and lights, was taking place. Jews, fleeing Roman persecution, are sup- posed to have come in great numbers to these parts in the 1st century AD and settled and prospered. At Mattancherit, the syna- gogue — light, colourful, airy — in Syna- gogue Lane, off Jewtown Road, was built in 1658 (Entrance, Rupees 1'). There are 1,200 17th-century hand-painted Chinese tiles on the floor, each different. Today, I was told, there are only 18 Jews left in Cochin, though some still live in style. The rest have gone to Israel. The President of Israel, Ezer Weizman, visited the other day, and told the Jews of Bombay and his Indian hosts that Israeli technology could help make India a land of milk and honey. (It probably could too: Indian milk production has now exceeded that of the United States and is the highest in the world.) Indian driving is a frightener; there is no lane discipline, because there are no lanes. Road signs remind drivers, 'Your licence is for driving safely'. But most drivers go as fast as they can and expect everything in their path to get out of the way: pedestri- ans, cyclists, cows, bullock-carts, two-wheel- ers, three-wheeled auto-rickshaws, cars, trucks and buses. Nothing deviates until the last possible millisecond. Cars, trucks, buses coming towards you down their hard shoulder, which your driver is using to overtake the truck ahead, which has swerved to miss the auto-rickshaw passing the bullock-cart, do not deviate at all. In spite of the skill and split-second timing of Rama, who took us most of the way, it was bliss to escape to a rice-boat on the back- waters of Kerala, which had a maximum speed of two kilometres an hour. Here we found calm water, green paddy, luscious foliage, peace and quiet, broken only by fishermen hawking their wares from flimsy canoes, and once by a loudspeaker promot- ing a range of jewellery on sale in Alleppey, Venice of the East.
In columns of newsprint daily, the refuses denounce the organisers of the Indian film festival at Trivandrum, and exhibitors puff their wares. The screening of Erotic Tales caused a stir: 'Gruff policemen with lathis could not dissuade passionate fans of eroti- ca from breaking down a door to enter the screening hall.' The biggest joke of the fes- tival, according to one official, `was that the erotic films were not erotic at all'. At Pad- manabhapuram, under the Western Ghats, the Maharajah of Travancore's summer palace, built in the Chinese style in teak and rosewood — cool, spacious, elegant delivers exactly what it promises. From Surya Samudra, we watched the sun set in the Arabian Sea. Later, oil lamps on fishing boats glowed like fireflies in the darkened bay.
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