Still Praying for Rain

Priests performing Varuna Japam to invoke the Rain God,
by standing inside concrete tubs filled with water.
New Indian Express photo by D. Sampath Kumar

Waiting for water sans sleep is city’s everyday ritual

From a review of Letters From Madras by Julia Maitland, first published in 1843:

... European women were coming over in shiploads to defend their national and religious identities, while simultaneously seeking suitable husbands. The delicate balance between the English and the Indians was being thrown into a spin for the first time in 200 years because of increased imperialism and missionary activity, which aimed at converting the native people in matters of religion and education. Julia arrived with firm assumptions about race: Indians, she believed were ignorant, lazy, servile, cheats, wicked and foolish. She called them a "cringing set," ...

... She arrives in Madras in a great boat on the tip of a formidable surf and is at first quite pleased by the large, airy houses with high ceilings and rooms as large as chapels. But she soon discovers that she doesn't like Madras much at all.

She calls it "England in perspiration" and complains that all the institutions in Madras are committee ridden which she looks on as the next step to being bedridden. Everyone seems to be eaten up by laziness and listlessness. She's especially critical of the European ladies in Madras who spend all their time writing useless chits, then going on morning visits (which she cannot abide), taking tiffin with a friend, writing more chits and culminating the day at dinner parties that are dull, grand and silent, in mosquito-infested houses where nothing of interest is ever talked about.

...Her life is soon embroiled in domesticity, duplicity, thievery and servants, of whom she says, "It seems to me they sleep nowhere, and eat nothing... They have mats on the steps and live upon rice. But they do very little... " She records her conversations with Brahmins, butlers, and rajahs with a great deal of humour and also includes excerpts of the many metaphysical debates she has with her Moonshee about astronomy, the nature of god, the transmigration of souls and their individual shasters...

Unsurprisingly, weather is a great topic of conversation, and much is made of the ever-present heat ...

This book is important because of the specific visual images it conjures up of an India that was and continues to be. On one hand there's an almost wild beauty that has almost vanished in modern urban Madras, of sprawling houses in Harrington Gardens with deer prancing about on the front lawn and jackals howling under the windows. Simultaneously, there are failed monsoons, floods, famines racking the countryside and mothers fighting to feed their children - scenes all too familiar today. More disturbing is the fact that we are still battling the same stalwart issues of caste, class, race, religion, gender, and imperialism...(more)