The Land Of Long Memory

Avoid the crowds for the temples and traditions of India’s deep south, Tamil Nadu, where a culture some 2,000 years in the making still hums to the rhythms of its classical past…

- David Abram

The early-morning bus shuddered to a halt in the little town with a big name: Thiruparakundaram. Deep in the south-east corner of India, we arrived near the gateway of the temple I’d come to visit, where a cluster of sodden pilgrims were preparing to perform a puja (worship) after their ritual bathe.

The air was still cool and the bazaar quiet, save for the roar of a kerosene stove at a tea stall and what sounded like chanting coming from a side road. At first I thought it was a recording; then I realised the voices were real, and that there were lots of them, producing a swirl of notes that rose and fell in archaic intervals, underscored by strange, syncopated rhythms.

The sound was coming through the open windows of an old school, where a class of a dozen boys were sitting cross-legged on the floor of a pillared hall facing their teacher. They were bare-chested, dressed in identical dhotis of unstitched, canary-yellow cloth, with stripes of white ash paste smeared on their arms and foreheads, and sacred threads strung diagonally across their torsos, denoting their status as members of the priestly Brahmin caste.

A man with large spectacles and a row of pens in his shirt pocket then appeared at my side. “Gentleman,” he said. “These fellows are singing verses of Vedas. Sanskrit language. Veeeeeeery old!’ He then raised a knobbly forefinger to emphasise his point, before promptly presenting me with the school’s donation book.