“What can I say of this wonderful wilderness…the pen trembles at its mention alone”, wrote Mir Hussain Ali Khan Kirmani in the late 18th century, describing a “wild country…as beautiful as the garden of Paradise”, its roads and paths “as confused as the lines of the galaxy”. This wild beauty, now inexorably stripped and tamed, made an indelible impression on the Kodava imagination. Rivers, hills and forests were all venerated. Sacred streams teemed with fish which were not trapped and uncounted meadows, hillocks and grasslands dedicated to nature spirits were scattered across the land. Surrounded by abundance, preserving and protecting the land informed every rule for farming and hunting, acknowledging the deep interconnectedness of all life. Extensive stretches of sacred groves, now reduced to a few sparse acres each, leave an impression that all of Kodagu was once, a vast open air shrine, a great, collective evocation of nature.
The beauty of Kodagu is a wounding kind. It snags your soul and lays bare all your defences. It seeps into the imagination, and made poets of clans of rough warriors, every man a dudipatkara—a poet and singer—who composed and sang long narrative songs to the beat of a small, hand-held drum. Over uncounted generations the hills echoed with voices singing while walking from place to place, continually invoking the landscape: river, hill, meadow, grove, valley, ford and pass. The songs celebrated battles, feuds, tales of love, sorcery and magic, the heroes of the land and a way of life that, in the 21st century, is disappearing swiftly as the land itself succumbs to relentless pressure.
In my travels, the narrow roads that crisscrossed the hills and valleys of Kodagu seemed endless, tapering eventually, inevitably, to footpaths framed by blue hills—that colour of unquenchable longing and desire. The place itself appeared limitless, filled with the vast silences of the gaps in our history and magnificent, untouched vistas that robbed you of speech. It was difficult to imagine how small its geography was in reality, how vulnerable to change. As progress ruthlessly flattens out the world, what I seek draws further away. I persist, although it often eludes me, sometimes heartbreakingly. The distant hills have become a metaphor for this seeking and I recognize the need—perhaps we are all, in Pablo Neruda’s words, travellers who “come from far away, from that which is behind us and within us.” I am compelled to “…return to my country and once more to go wandering in the night and dawn of my native land.”