Thamiraparani

This is a story of a red tamarind tree that flows as a river past the village of Idayankudi. Two schoolmates met here, Lord Napier and Bishop Caldwell. Would you have thought, looking at one's frocks and the others grand vestments that once they were boys rolling together on the grass of Eton? Napier is adding titles to his name, the very next year, he would be Baron of Ettrick. Caldwell was collecting stories, all stories about the sourly named many limbed river that flowed by the Indian village he lived in- Idayankudi. It is funny how old schoolmates can, regardless of change of dress, of habitat, of visions of happiness, still rush into old school gossip, repeat the names of teachers and their own names for them, like a holy litany. But Napier did feel uneasy by the man before him, by his immersion in an alien- could he call it a culture? Caldwell was immersed. Had he not, in that very meeting, asked for some red chalk- geru- and there on the floor by the Vijayanarayanam tank, drew him a snake like object, like a totemic representation of a river. He had then stood back in satisfaction looking at his schoolmate. Two schoolmates meet on the west side of the Vijaynarayanam tank. Lord Napier and Bishop Caldwell. Caldwell is living in a village in Idayankudi. "The red tree flows through Tirunelveli district. Like the branches of a tree it permeates corners of the red soil". He had laughed when Napier expressed his unease with the drawing "The clasp of a snake, the flow of a river, the self entangled vine with flowers, all growing out of the same bed, an identical grid of dots makes them all." Caldwell's finger had become his pencil, he was not even using the chalk any more, he was dipping it in a white we rice paste, it set up a rising distate in Napier, who had once seen, from a distance, an Indian squelching rice in a plate with his fingers, before eating it. And still he could not get his eyes off the pattern that seemed to be coming out of that wet finger, trailing behind it. It came back to him many years later in a dream in Scotland.An entangled vine made of red and white liquid pulls him into its messy estuaries, that seem to be a coil of snakes, his mattress.. he sinks further, screaming, into a grid of white dots made of sticky paste. "Is that not how these Indians paint their gods, totemic, lines, circles, stuck to the canvas like these lines are stuck to the floor." He had said that time, standing with the strange Caldwell. He felt relief when he saw the Thirumalai Nayak Palace that he visited some time later in Madurai, the Indo Saracenic architecture, the thousand pillars the elaborate paintings on the ceiling, he feels in control of, impressed by and willing to restore. Devi Meenaxi marries the poet Sunderesvar on the ceiling of the palace. "Why do I not see such work on canvas? " asks Lord Napier. "Why does such third rate work come from the Madras School of Art?" All the people around him nod their heads so he thinks he is saying something important. Ha ha ha Sarasvati bai: But people must be nodding their heads at him all the time Phalke: Hmm He thinks about the matter.. quite often actually, and later makes his famous address. Late evening on the balcony of the old navy building. Ships are docking in the distance. Young soldeirs from different parts of the world must be loitering around the docks. Lord Napier, Governor of Madras talks of how he wants the development of an Indian style that 'deals with the ideal and the allegorical', in which 'the virtues, the graces.. and other abstract conceptions and agencies are clothed in human forms which owe their majesty or their terrors to the Artist" He sees the endless possibilities of re-imagining the treasures of the epics "All that is needed to promulgate their beauty and fame is that, in their purest and nobler passages and with the powers of European Art, they should engage in the service of the national pencil as they have fastened on the national memory and animated the national voice"