Guest Post by MOHAN RAO
I returned a few days ago after four wonderful days in Trivandrum – having gone back there after some thirty years. Looking over Trivandrum from my seventh floor hotel room was a wondrous sight for sore eyes, a thick lush greenness everywhere. Hardly any high rises, an occasional mosque, temple or church rising above the green.
Going for a walk the next morning, around the medical college area, it was vastly reassuring to still see some old bungalows, and a number of ugly new ones of course. But not that many apartment blocks. Unlike Bangalore, the ones that have come up are not named Malibu Towers or Sacramento, but Revi Apartments.
Yes, it was wondrous to see Lakshmi still spelt Lekshmi and Ramya, Remya.
But what was distressing is the sprouting of new temples all over, most of them illegal ones. The legal ones have sprouted gopurams like Tamil temples, albeit more modest, but are also fiercely coloured like Tamil ones. I was astonished to see Ganesha temples near the medical college, because Ganesha is not a deity widely worshiped in Kerala. But worse was to come. Under every peepal tree, Ficus religiosa it is called, no doubt, have come up makeshift temples offering worship. And they are acquiring more or less permanent and pukka status.
Along the roads are posters of Ganesha, surrounded by saffron flags. In many of these, loudspeakers blared classical music – with a slightly filmy Balamurali Krishna touch – in praise of Ganesha. I saw this, shocked, at the Passport Office, no doubt put up by the Union there.
Thus is the Shiva Sena announcing its presence in Kerala.
I love Ganesha, since he is fat and dances wonderfully and loves reading and music, and is neither human nor animal. But what is the Ganesha that Shiva Sena is spreading? M.S.S.Pandian had a paper in the EPW on the use of Ganesha by Hinutvavadis in Tamil Nadu some time back,
What was also striking is the large number of vegetarian restaurants that have come up, no doubt catering to tourists from North India. While the local restaurants serving beef curry and appams also exist, they are clearly in a minority. What was also striking is that so many of these vegetarian restaurants are named Aryan or Arya or even Aarya – like Shah Rukh Khan’s son. Talk of the North Indian-Hinduisation of India.
The proportion of Mallu men without moustaches seems to have reached an unprecedented two per cent. These are largely young, in the IT industry and so on. But even they wear gold on their necks, thick gold chains, nestling in hairy chests. Strikingly almost all Hindu women now wear bindis – hardly anyone did earlier – and a shockingly high proportion wear sindoors – there is no word for this in South Indian languages. And I had not seen Muslim women in either burqa or hijab before. They usually wore a mundu – like other chedthis(aunties) – but with a kurti like blouse, unlike the blouses Hindu women wore, exposing their midriffs. Now Muslim women were largely in either burquas or hijabs and some even wearing Arab- style dresses, full gowns with hijab. A few of these are really chic young ones, with high-heeled shoes.
Some spaces in Trivandrum are still achingly beautiful, architecturally, aesthetically, especially around the University and Secretariat areas, and areas around the museum and the zoo. Incidentally, Trivandrum must have the most cultured animals in the world, since the zoo is located between the museum and the Sri Chitra Thirunal art gallery.
Distressingly, even this art gallery asks you to take off your shoes, as does the museum of the Sri Chitra Thirunal Palace, near the famous temple. I avoided the temples because of their dress code: all men have to go in bare-chested, wearing a mundu. I wouldn’t have minded the mundu, but the bare-chesting is to see who has a poonal ( Brahminical thread) and who doesn’t. But therefore missed the magnificent murals in the temple. Although I do not know if an entry to the temple allows you to look for these.
I forgot my dark glasses at the palace museum, but went back not hoping for the miraculous, but voila, at the museum office, they handed it over to me saying they had not gone for lunch since they expected me to come back. Utterly, utterly unbelievable. But more was to come.
We were supposed to check in on 10th for the conference on 11th, but the flight was delayed and so we actually checked in at 01.00 on the 11th. After the conference, I was staying on for one more day at my own expense. My flight was at 06.00 this morning and I was checking out at 04.00.
To my astonishment, the hotel refused to accept payment for another day from me.
It is still God’s own country but the old Gods seem to have fled.
Mohan Rao is Professor at Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, JNU
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
true gods own country is changing for the worse.
religious festivals once used to be more about fun, celebration and togetherness of all people than about religious beliefs or even restricted to those who follow the religion. until now the people never bothered to find out which god you believed in or even whether you believed in one! that was kerala until the 90s.
but suddenly, people have become religious and worse making a show of their religion in their outward attire.
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“and a shockingly high proportion wear sindoors – there is no word for this in South Indian languages”
Soundarya Lahiri, attributed to the Adi Shankara whose birth is traditionally placed in Kerala mentions the word. I think such easy to detect factual errors greatly undermine arguments being made in Kafila articles. (For example, in this instance, the author’s claim is that the use of sindur is evidence of some kind of “northification”. How is am I supposed to believe it when the underlying premise turns out to be wrong?)
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Also, as a North Indian, I am left wondering why I never see these ‘Arya’ themed vegetarian restaurants in the north. Presumably the north is yet to be “North Indian Hinduised” :-).
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Perhaps it already is saffron enough..more of saffron will actually darken it enough to resemble darkish orange close to black. Ayodhya, mathura, kashi and the likes. Western UP seems to have become a battleground.
It has become so suffocating that the battle must rather will be taken to the southern lands to free up some space up north
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Before I respond, I must ask you a very simple question. Have you ever been to UP? (Given that you place Ayodhya and Kashi in Western UP, and yet feel competent to issue proclamations about these areas that would sound alien to any resident gives me cause for doubt).
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Ahannasmi, while it is an error on Mohan’s part to say there is no word for sindoor in South Indian languages, since sindooram is a Sanskrit word for vermillion (an error we should have caught before publishing), his point is about sindoor worn in the parting of the hair as a symbol of marriage for women. His meaning would have been clear to any Malayali. Wearing sindoor in the parting as a sign of marriage is completely alien to Kerala, he is right there. And Sankaracharya’s reference to sinduraaruna vigraham in Lalita Sahsranamam of course, refers to the colour vermillion, the colour of the idol being worshipped.
It’s good to acknowledge such faithful readers of Kafila always on the alert to spot our ‘easy to spot’ errors :) Fortunately such usually minor errors actually make no difference whatsoever to the arguments made.
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Yes, I am willing to agree with the author on his observations on Kerala, but it is easy to see in this case his wrong generalization to all “south Indian” languages immediately undermines his central argument that this is a sign of some kind of saffronized northification of the “South”.
For what it is worth (and jazz’s comment placing “Kashi” and”Ayodha” in Western UP notwithstanding), I, as a reasonably secular North Indian, have always found all the parts of the South I have visited (Karnataka and Tamil Nadu) to be far more religiously conservative than the North, especially in terms of vegetarianism.
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You found Tamil Nadu to be far more religiously conservative than the North, especially in terms of vegetarianism. Makes one wonder what was your naturę of visit – pilgrimage?. You are talking of a state which have restuarants serving beef in most cities. I am interested to know which part of the cow belt you are comparing it to.
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And as a secular South Indian, I would wager that your impression is because conservative upper-caste/class groups have always been very successful at creating an impression of being representative of entire communities to outsiders. I say this because my stay in the North for 5 years (I’m 30) gave me the exact opposite impression (that the north is more conservative, especially when it came to vegetarianism) for presumably the same reasons. If the subaltern can speak, it ain’t loud enough, not yet.
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Looks like people have a tendency to find the place they are not from more religiously conservative. I have trouble accepting Ramasamy’s assertion that the North is more vegetarian than the South. Presumably his stay in the North was in Haridwar or Rishikesh. Meat shops seemed much more common on the streets of the small town in eastern UP I lived in than even in metros like Chennai and Bangalore, where some of my friends had to frequent pseudo-Punjabi dhabas to get their non-vegetarian dishes (and I haven’t even visited any of the pilgrimage centers in the South, which would presumably be more conservative). However, my experience of Chennai is limited (just a few days), so my perspective of Tamil Nadu may be coloured by what I saw in Bangalore, where I have stayed for months on end at different periods of time.
Now of course, these are all personal anecdotes. It seems there are indeed surveys showing that the proportion of vegetarians in Tamil Nadu is lower even than Punjab, though I cannot find any figures on Karnataka. But I certainly found it interesting that “pure vegetarian” restaurants were more common (and almost the “default”) in a metro like Bangalore than in the small town in the North that I came from (which BTW happens to be some sort of pilgrimage center in its own right).
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The most interesting and funny sentence in the article (???) is “The proportion of Mallu men without moustaches seems to have reached an unprecedented two per cent”. I was not able to understand how the author (Prof.Mohan Rao) reached into that figure of two percentage?? Was it possible to calculate this if someone is sitting on seventh floor building?? (Prof.Rao was staying on seventh floor). At last, I understood that it is possible to do so if you add a word “seems” in writing. Prof. Rao is very funny…..!!!!
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