The House of Blue Mangoes (68 page)

One further paragraph will suffice to encapsulate Kilanad’s main points of interest. It has an area of 489 sq. miles with a maximum width of sixty-five miles and length of eighty-six miles, with three towns, forty-eight villages and a total population of one hundred and fifty-three thousand. Its chief town is Melur, with a population of eighteen thousand and ninety-nine, on the Nanguneri–Nagercoil highway. It is where the Collector is based; it has a big Mariamman temple and a famous cattle fair is held there twice a year. The second biggest town, Ranivoor (population fifteen thousand two hundred and fifty), the headquarters of the second of the two taluqas, is almost equidistant between the district headquarters and the only other town in the district, Meenakshikoil on the coast. Ranivoor is famous throughout the district for a church dedicated to St Luke that is supposed to have miraculous powers of exorcism. Meenakshikoil, which became the headquarters of the taluqa of the same name early in the twentieth century, has an eighteenth-century temple dedicated to the Goddess Meenakshi built by Kulla Marudu, the last feudal lord of the area. Predating the Meenakshi temple is a small Murugan temple across the river in Chevathar village.

The entire district is sparsely populated and musters the lowest revenues in the Presidency. The chief cash crops are cotton, to the north, and palmyra products, jaggery, arrack, baskets and mats – these last are famous throughout the Presidency.

Of Pulimed, across the border in the central Travancore hills, there is little to add, except that it’s an imaginary tea-planting district between Peermade and Vandiperiyar.

A word about some of the caste groups in the book. The Andavars (who bear no resemblance whatsoever to the contemporary followers of Andavan Swamigal, among others), Vedhars (not to be confused with Vedars, Vetans, Veduvars, etc.) and Marudars do not find a place among the hundreds of castes and sub-castes exhaustively surveyed by the Anthropological Survey of India in the People of India project, compiled and published in thirteen volumes by K. S. Singh (OUP, 1997). I invented three new castes because I did not wish to add fuel to the caste controversies that have raged for centuries now, to the general detriment of the country and the states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala which are my particular interest. All that needs to be said here is that the three castes share similarities with some of the non-Brahmin castes in the south.

Most of the historical incidents and personages to be encountered in the narrative are well known and need little by way of explication. The only one that needs comment is the murder of Robert William d’Escourt Ashe. His assassination is a historically documented fact. Among those convicted of his murder were Neelakantha Brahmachari and Vanchi Iyer. Aaron Dorai wasn’t among them.

Finally, I should point out that I’ve retained spellings from the period in which the novel is set – Tinnevelly for Tirunelveli, Madura for Madurai, Madras for Chennai and so on.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although this book is a work of fiction, I’ve tried to be as rigorous as possible in researching its historical, sociological and technical aspects. Of the dozens of books I consulted I found the following especially useful:

ON VILLAGE LIFE
:
The Remembered Village
by M. N. Srinivas (OUP, 1976),
Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way
by E. Valentine Daniel (University of California Press, 1984) where I first encountered an interesting version of the son of the soil theory and
Siva & her Sisters
by Karin Kapadia (OUP, 1996) which has excellent descriptions of ritual possession by villagers.

ON THE HISTORICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF SOUTH INDIA:
Peasant History of South India
by David Ludden (OUP, 1989),
The Politics of South India
, 1
920-
1
937
by Christopher John Baker (Vikas, 1976),
Politics and Social Conflict in South India
by Eugene F. Irschick (OUP, 1969),
The Nadars of Tamilnad
by Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr (OUP, 1969) which is particularly good on caste conflict and
Land and Caste in South India
by Dharma Kumar (Manohar, 1992). I found
The Rajaji Story
, 1
937
–1
972
by Rajmohan Gandhi (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1984) useful and
National Movement in Tamil Nadu
, 1
905
–1
914
by N. Rajendran (OUP, 1994) excellent for details of the extremist movement and the assassination of William Ashe.

ON THE RAJ:
In my view James Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy,
Pax Britannica
(Faber, 1968),
Heaven’s Command
(Faber, 1973) and
Farewell the Trumpets
(Faber, 1978), still remains the best account of the Raj, a quarter-century after it was published.
Raj
by Lawrence James (Little Brown, 1997) is a good single-volume history and
Plain Tales from the Raj
by Charles Allen (Abacus, 1975) is an excellent gossipy account of the time.

ON THE INDIAN CIVIL SERVICE:
The Men Who Ruled India
by Philip Mason (Jonathan Cape, 2 vols., 1953, 1954) is the acknowledged classic, but the book I relied on the most sadly had lost both cover and title page so I had no means of ascertaining the author and publisher’s name. No matter,
The District Office
r
in India
proved to be an invaluable work of reference.

ON SIDDHA:
Siddha Medicine
by Dr Paul Joseph Thottam (Penguin, 2000) is the best book on the subject.

ON THE INDIAN NATIONALIST MOVEMENT:
I’ve relied heavily on
India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857–1947
by Bipan Chandra et al. (Viking, 1988).

ON THE PLANTING LIFE:
Above the Heron’s Pool
by Heather Lovatt and Peter de Jong (Bacsa, 1993) is an excellent introduction to tea-planting in south India and
A Planting Century
by S. Muthiah (East-West, 1993) is a comprehensive history of the industry.

ON MAN-EATERS:
On man-eating tigers, there is only one authority, the incomparable Jim Corbett. I’d recommend all his books.

TRANSLATIONS:
I consulted several translations of the
Bhagavad Gita
. The lines that appear in this novel are an edited version of the Gita Press translation.

Finally Aaron’s jump over the big well is a fictional retelling of an actual exploit in a south Indian village, narrated in the book by Amy Carmichael,
Raj, Brigand Chief
(Seeley, Service & Co. Limited, 1927). I must thank my father for drawing my attention to this.

Grateful acknowledgment is made by my publishers and me to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission, this has not been possible in all cases; any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions.

I’m indebted to my wife Rachna, first and last, for without her constant support, patience and good advice this novel wouldn’t have been written. I am also entirely grateful to Vikram Seth for spurring me on to complete the manuscript. Having acted as a catalyst, he then read and commented on the manuscript, acts of generosity not easily forgotten.

I delight in my agents and principal publishers, they are the best any writer could hope to have. David Godwin and Katie Levell in London; Nicole Aragi who placed the book in New York; Cathy Hemming, Terry Karten, Lisa Miller and Andrew Proctor at HarperCollins in the US; and Maggie Mckernan, Geoff Duffield, Katie White and Alice Chasey at Orion in the UK whose enthusiasm and support breathed life into the manuscript as well as shepherded it through the publication process – to all of you my heartfelt gratitude.

My brilliant colleagues at Penguin India – in order of their appearance in the book’s life, Rajesh Sharma, Aparajita Pant, Ravi Singh, V. K. Karthika, Hemali Sodhi, Bena Sareen, Philip Koshy, Sayoni Basu and P. M. Sukumar – ensured the book was published exceptionally well in its place of birth. Thank you all very much indeed.

Grateful thanks too to David Wan, Peter Field and Aveek Sarkar who were supportive of me every step of the way.

Others I am indebted to for contributing their time and effort to the book’s cause are my father Eddie Davidar (whose knowledge of the tea industry is unrivalled); my uncle Reggie Davidar, for sharing a couple of stories; Kamazh and Kenaz Solomon who guided me through the intricacies of caste and tradition (as did M. S. S. Pandian); Dr Paul Thottam who vetted the chapters on siddha; Drs Raj Kubba and N. P. S. Chawla who explained the mysteries of pigmentation and diabetes respectively; S. Krishnan who read and commented on portions of the manuscript; Vivek Menon who pointed out that ‘nightjars drift and do not whir’; John Ashworth who suggested the names of England’s dreariest towns; and most importantly, Raman Mahadevan who patiently and assiduously worked his way through the manuscript pointing out inaccuracies and errors.

Friends and family who were generous in their support include Dee Aldrich, Rupayan Bhattacharya, Urvashi Butalia, Harry Davidar, Ruth Davidar, Nirmala Lakshman, Vijit and Divya Malik, Suketu Mehta, ‘Mooma’, Bipin Nayak, Aggie Perilli, Monisha Shah, K. D. Singh and Nini Singh, Pia and Mallika Singh and Pavan Varma.

I am grateful to Prabuddha Das Gupta for taking the author photograph, Dinesh Khanna for shooting pictures of mango trees, Tanthoni for his photographs of blue mangoes and Sunita Kohli for ferreting out the owners of whitewashed bungalows in Delhi. The wonderful map of Kilanad district and Pulimed at the front of the book is the creation of Uma Bhattacharya, P. Arun and Benu Joshi. Thank you very much.

I would like to thank Nasir and Parul Prakash for their hospitality in Peermade, my aunt Shakuntala and Erik Carlquist for giving us the run of the house in Puthalam, Aradhana Bisht for drawing my attention to the poem from which the epigraph is extracted, and Gillian Wright for insisting the rosy pastors return to the wild guava tree.

Finally, it is my deepest regret that my mother Sushila is not alive to celebrate the publication of the book. She was the best writer in the family and her stories and insights have filled my head for as long as I can remember. I can only hope
The House of Blue Mangoes
does justice to her memory.

About the Author

David Davidar is the author of the international best-seller,
The House of Blue Mangoes
, which was published in sixteen countries, and
The Solitude of Emperors
.

By David Davidar

The House of Blue Mangoes

The Solitude of Emperors

Copyright

A Phoenix ebook

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
First published in ebook in 2012 by Phoenix.

Copyright © David Davidar 2002

The moral right of David Davidar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 7802 2540 1

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