Travancore, the Beautiful

Nobody that came to Travancore ever went without leaving some praise behind. It is the praise of beauty quietly tendered. There is grandeur in the Himalayas, vastness in the Gangetic Plain, blended variety in Central India, intermittent effects in Hyderabad, some gorgeous pomp of Nature in Mysore, but the tranquil beauties of Travancore are nowhere else to be seen. I am assailed by a swarm of images when I think what to call Travancore, but some who have been before me have called it the garden of India and I have no quarrel except to say that first of all it is Nature’s own pleasure-garden.

It is a new world the traveller finds when he passes from Tamilnad into Kerala; and of the three divisions of Kerala, Travancore, Cochin and British Malabar, Travancore is not only the largest but also the loveliest. There is a certain pallor in the contexture of features in British Malabar, and while Cochin is undoubtedly pretty Travancore is both fresh and fair.

Those who live all their lives in Travancore can never know how beautiful is their country, and those who have never been to it can scarce think. It was only after I had gone out ‘to see the world’ and returned that I realised. Then it was that the State seemed to me, for the first time, mantled in a modest glory that I had never seen anywhere else. Then it was the freshness, the softness, the pure loveliness, of things and prospects that everywhere encircle one in this country began to breathe a spell upon my mind and fill my eyes with their own coy felicity. In fact, it was as if I had awaked one morning to find Travancore famous and I was the more rejoiced because in some half real, half imaginative way I myself seemed to share in this fame that had lain hidden so long and come to light so suddenly.

You may go where you like in Travancore, you will not come upon one small patch of land that you could call drab or commonplace. And if you think of the country as a whole, the picture that rises in your mind is that of a fairyland bathed by silvery showers and fertilised by sparkling streams, perpetually clothed in emerald green and studded with innumerable kinds of plants and trees crowned with masses of leaves and blessed with clustering bouquets and garlands of fruits. From the hazy ramparts of the Western Ghats, from which here and there the blue dome of the sky is pierced by pinnacles and spires, in the east, to the sapphire sea clambering up the shores, sprinkling its milk-white foam on the sands, in the west; from Cochin State in the north, where the cocoanut-palms obliterate the political frontier, to Cape Comorin in the south, where the oceans gather and India ends in a classic conjunction of land and water, which is Travancore, there is a coolness and greenness everywhere, even in the hottest months, wooing you to linger and refresh yourself. If you like you may think Travancore a mild season of spring beautifully nestled between the sea and hills, but if you don’t, you can yet have no doubt that it is one of the most comforting countries in the world.

I have almost said that there is no break in the beauty of Travancore, that it is a single picture, that, in short, it acts chiefly on one’s mind by the sum of its charms. Yet, in spite of its singular harmoniousness of beauty, you are not sure as you flit from place to place in this unique garden State, like a bird among the aeries of a tree in full life, that it has not many beauties in its flowing oneness of beauty to be felt and enjoyed one after another. Among these, first and foremost, are the waters of Travancore.

These waters, sprung from the struggle between land and sea, unfold themselves like liquid music from the northern borders of Lower Travancore to within a few miles of Trivandrum, covering a length of about 150 miles. The Arabian Sea heaves alongside, while they slumber and dream under mellow moons and silent starry skies. Forests of cocoanut palms arise from their banks and roll away inland in tumbling waves of green as far as the eye can see. The total extent occupied by these ‘inland seas’ is 160 square miles and the largest of them is the ‘Vembanad Kayal,’ 52 miles long and nearly 10 miles broad. The ‘Ashtamudi Kayal,’ the eight-pronged lake in the Quilon District, which has been called the Loch Lomond of Travancore, is a sparkling gem set in green tresses of vegetation. It must not be imagined, however, that the waters are merely geographical ornaments, for without them the cocoanut-palms cannot flourish and without the cocoanut-palms Travancore should never have possessed the distinctive flavour of prosperity so generally associated with the State. They provide, too, a network of very useful and very beautiful water-roads, open and unfettered as the sea and yet immune from its perils.

The waters are an ‘intrusion’ in the original physical features of Malabar. Once they were all a part of the sea. Malabar is one of the heaviest rain-belts of India and its rivers, surcharged with the loose soil of the land, have been pushing the waves of the sea by invisible degrees. It is almost a scientific certainty that there are even rivers running underground to the sea between Cochin and Quilon, the principal region of the waters. The sea, however, has receded only in part although the rivers have thrown up new shores to mark the extent of their advance into it. It is the shallow and quiet patches of sea lying behind these outposts of land that are called the waters of Travancore.

In few other bodies of water, running or still, is there more soothing beauty than in these waters. They look like the limpid floor of the sky and allay the troubled spirit like a wandering cloud. They shine gently by day and shimmer under the stars, and if the weather is fair they become an azure half-hidden glow. Only when the monsoon loses its temper or a seawind howls through the land, there occurs a disturbance in their habitual tranquillity.

A ‘cruise’ on the waters in a country-barge is about the most enjoyable thing there is to be had in all India. The craft is an object lesson to the vanities of haste and speed. It moves without any of the familiar accompaniments of movement. It sleeps and moves and puts you by and by to sleep by the charm of its quiet example. In it you are in a floating nest and, if waking, you keep looking out at the glorious panorama of green cocoanut-palms which everywhere surround you as if in an affectionate gesture of embrace. Time has no use for the sailor in these waters. It stands still and meaningless. And he enjoys the happiest of all illusions, that he comes from nowhere and goes to nowhere and that he is at last out of the reach of the fever and fret of life. The waters are a dream in the sleeping beauties of land and water.

It would take me long were I to describe the array of single beautiful places and scenes like Varkala by the sea between Trivandrum and Quilon, where the land ends in a cliff reminding you of that which is conjured up by an excellent son for his unfortunate father in King Lear, where the sea seems lying enchanted under the shadow of that towering cliff and where all over the wide and rolling highland Nature like a beauty-sprite spreads her handsomest gifts; or lovely hill-stations like Peermade, where meadow-lands and mountains mix delightfully and breathe the pleasantest breezes; or even the celebrated ‘Sankumukham,’ the seashore of Trivandrum, which yields to no strand in the world in its combined effect of sea and sand, space, scene and setting, of curly surges, of flowing breezes breaking into continual song in the foliage of casuarina-trees. Nor would I speak now of the peculiar graces of the people of Travancore, not of those that stand in the public eye or figure in the politics of the day, but of the common people who live in happy secluded villages and are hardly yet touched by the infectious tendencies in modern civilisation and who consequently add to the natural charms of the land. But of one thing I must speak, which is Travancore’s first and foremost glory and in which, moreover, all India rejoices, and which is, if you have not already guessed, the Land’s End of India. It is Cape Comorin where all India becomes a thin promontory of land pushing into the oceans. As you come to the Cape, the nearer you come the further it seems to go till, all on a sudden, when you least expect it, you find yourself right amid the oceans. Sea to the right, sea to the left and all before and beyond, you ask yourself, ‘Is it a dream?’ You wonder where you stand, in land or water. The blue dome of the sky flattens over you and you nearly say to yourself that you have only to jump and put up your hand to touch it. The horizons appear to move towards you. The sun rises a few paces to the east of you in the waters and sets a few paces to the west of you in the waters. In the night-time the stars cluster over your head like coronals and the mellow moon seems to weave a halo about you. Here is infinity where everything appears immediate and infinitesimal. Here is all the manifoldness of India melted into a single unity. Cape Comorin is a call, a prayer, a cry, for oneness.

In the vast plains and plateaus of India, where everything is large, the small things assume an importance they have not and the large ones are easily overlooked. But when you stand at the very end of India, which is no bigger than the palm of your hand and where yet the earth and oceans mingle and even the heavens bend down to mingle with them, the larger things become small enough for you to see and the smaller ones melt into thin air. You should come to Cape Comorin to see the vision of things in their just perspective, to feel the loftier patriotism that comes from the knowledge that the many are not many but that all is one.

This is chiefly the reason why our ancestors declared Cape Comorin one of the most sacred places of India and erected a temple on it for a virgin goddess, Kanya Kumari, the pure, looking out into the waters smilingly. And in her presence, so it seems, the seas lose their accustomed fury and the land of men its annoyances. You may worship her or not, but cannot help appreciating the beautiful thought that placed a virgin goddess to preside over the termination of India and the conjunction of the oceans.

If you come to Travancore by railway from the Tinnevelly District you will pass through the Ghats, bathing your eyes in showers of hills and dales teeming with the richest and freshest vegetation, The train zigzags and circles, emitting clouds of smoke, (which take on a strange beauty in the clear air and tangled green), and going two miles to one. As you look at the rolling pomp and jubilee of the woods, you come to see for yourself that you are entering a really beautiful land.