Goodbye Karnataka

I’m sitting in a bus on the way to Somnathpur with my friend Chitra.  Bob Marley is in my ear, the hot Indian sun burns outside but I’m inside the cool dirty bus, feeling lucky until time dumps us off at Mysore.

At Somnathpur is a beautiful temple constructed in the Hoysala style, I’m promised.  It’s been abandoned by all but tourists such as myself who come to gape at intricate carvings and imagine the magnificence of a bygone era.  The past always looks so rosy in retrospect.

In retrospect, I shall remember my year in India fondly.  I shall miss the Indian sun that burns so brightly, the Indian people so full of life that they shout when talking would suffice, the Indian cows and stray dogs that are permanent occupants of all roads.  I shall miss seeing picture postcard images such as that which is before my eyes now.

A field mostly brown with thatch from a recent harvest, but a quarter of it is green with intact stalks of ragi that graces a lot of Karnataka.  A boy, younger than I am, bare-chested and black in the white sun, standing on a wooden bullock cart, urging his cows through the thatch – no where else have I seen cows treated with as much respect or put to as much use as in India.

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At Mysore, we alighted and caught a rickety bus to Bannur, filled with farmers and farmer’s wives and daughters.  As we move further into the interior, we leave urbanization behind and globalization.  I feel like I’m entering scenes from two decades ago when I used to live in this country.  The women in rural India grow up so young.  The girl near Chitra must hardly be 18, but she cares for the child near her with the tenderness of a mother.

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We alighted at Bannur, and took an auto rickshaw to Somnathpur, moving many more years into the past.  People stare at us, surprised that two girls would travel alone, and that too by the luxury of an auto, Chitra says.  This is probably what ancient India looked like: dusty and brown, with green fields and coconut palms interspersed.  I shall leave Karnataka in a week.  This is my farewell.  For all the tears and rage, its been a hospitable place-beautiful weather and some precious people I shall never forget.

 

 

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                     “Somnathapura is situated on the left banks of the Cauvery river.  The Keshava temple was built in A.D. 1268, by Somanatha Dandanayaka, an illustrious General of the Hoysala king Narasimha III (1254 – 1291 AD) and named after him.

                     This temple is a perfect example of the Hoysala style of architecture.  It has three sanctums on the West, South and North to Keshava, Venugopala and Janardhana, all connected.  It is an ornately carved temple of magnificant craftsmanship depicting Vishnu, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Ganesha, Rati-Manmatha and Mahishasura.  The ceilings and door jambs leading to the sactum sanctorium are exquisitely carved.

                     There are inscriptions engraved on a slab standing at the entrance, inside the temple, dated from 1269 to 1550 AD that detail the construction of the temple and grants made to it.”

 

To get there: bus to Mysore, bus to Bannur and hire an autorickshaw for Rs. 100, or brave immense crowds in a private cab that stuffs people in like chickens for Rs. 10. 

 

Whatever happend to sisterhood?

Sometimes I lose faith in the world.  When a woman who is old enough to be my mother sits on my lap trying to get into a seat that she is not entitled to; when a fat woman tries to push me out of the way to sit in a seat my friend vacates; when an old woman with cataracts asks me to get up, and when the seat next to her clears she tries to seat her daughter and grandkids in that seat; when that daughter tries to leap over two other woman and me to get to that empty seat; when a bus conductor pushes women like cattle to get through the bus, and when I ask  him “What the fuck do you think of yourself?”, he turns around and swears, while all the women titter and giggle; when womanhood fails and woman does not stand up for her sister, when race and language take precedence over fairness and fair play, where women laugh and share seats with men who joke and stare and spit and grope, I think I am entitled to lose faith in that world.  This failure of womanhood is rural Karnataka.  Will the world really be a better place if women rule it?  I doubt it.