Compiled by London swaminathan

Date: 15^th September 2015

Post No: 2161

Time uploaded in London :– 19-50

(Thanks  for the pictures) 

I am reading an interesting book titled “South Indian Hours” written by Oswald J. Couldrey I.E.S., sometime Principal of Rajamundry College, published by Hurst and Blackett Ltd., London in 1924. The book has 3 colour and 19 other illustrations by the author.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

“The oxen of Telengana, including the famous Nellore breed, have shortish horns, but those of the further South are one and all crowned as it were with a great stringless lyre of ivory, which lends a silent note of majesty to the traffic of the streets and wharves of metropolitan Madras. Likewise upon the bows of men caste marks, the seals of the national gods, are commoner and larger, and commoner and more conspicuous also are the many forms of that contrarious Hindu tonsure, which leaves a long horse-tail of hair just where the European monk wears nothing.

These human fashions mean a greater steadfastness in the old and purely Indian order than the Telingas, in the towns at east, have been able to preserve. Not that the Tamil people are backward; rather they know better than their northern neighbours how to lay hold on the new without relinquishing the old. There is no need for an Andhra man to go to the Tamil country to study the Tamils. The latter visit him at home, and get employment in his offices and schools, faster than he can find room for them in his heart.

For the Tamil Brahmins are a remarkable race, clever and full of enterprise. For all their strict orthodoxy they adopted Western education earlier, and still ensue it more industriously, than the more easy-going men of Andhra-desha. Therefore are they sometimes called by lovers of analogy the Scots of Southern India; but the comparison, though illustrating well enough the point in question, should not be further pressed. It is perhaps chiefly the fear of Tamil penetration which has led the Andhras to agitate for a separate administration.

The Tamil Brahmins shave clean, unlike their Andhra brothers, who largely affect a Maratha-military moustache which hardly fits one’s notion of a Brahmin. True, it is the mark only of the Niyogi, the Brahmin who has renounced the service of religion for professional work in the world; but in the Tamil country even such retain the mask of ancestral holiness. Nothing impressed me more, on first arriving at South India, than the faces of these Tamil Brahmins. They reminded me of a Roman portrait-gallery, where the features of unknown sages, poets and statesmen are assembled, and sometimes the face occurs a Greek God grown thoughtful; all are chiselled in the same clear medium, but here it is darker than old marble, and liker walnut-wood or a very ancient ivory.

The difference is greater in the South between the higher and lower castes than in Telingana. The common people of the South are far inferior to those of Telengana in refinement of feature, but the Brahmins of the South, Aiyars and Ayangars, are at no such disadvantage beside their northern brother. Feminine beauty in these latitudes is generally held to shine brightest among the Tamil Aiyangars, the Vaishnava Brahmins of Coromandel.

The Southern ladies deserve also this praise, that tjhey still remain staunch to the noble silken flow of their ancestral costume, and robes darkly rich with India dyes, having among them nothing sewn but the sort close bodice; a costume which has not its equal in the world today for dignity and beauty. But the daughters of the Andhras, those at least who pretend to wealth and station, are beginning to coquette with the barbaric fashions of the West, and interpolate half sleeves, puffed and frilled, into such weeds as might have beseemed the mother of the Gracchi.

Altogether the Tamils have a far weightier and more  comfortable body of ancestral culture behind them than the people of the Cirkars. I shall never forget how disgusted I was when, having lately left Tanjore, where they still entertain one with a dance of damsels (unless vulgarity and puritanism have swept them away since 1909), I was asked, by a prominent citizen of an Andhra city of old renown, to an entertainment of card-conjuror and a gramophone were to be respectively the life and soul. Fortunately this was an extreme instance, but the suggested contrast was typical enough. Some are even said to consider the substitution of the gramophone for the dancing girl as a sign of advancing civilisation, because the dancing girls too often sing sweet love-songs over-boldly, or are otherwise no better than they should be.

But the Tamil people excels in every art, in the weaving of soft raiment as well as of alluring gestures, in the graving of brass, the carving of wood, the working of stone, in fact in the devising of all those embellishments which make the life of a  people happier for themselves, and more interesting to others. Such embellishments in a simpler form are still a part of popular life even in Telangana, but for centuries the country has not been rich enough to develop them, and its later prosperity turns away from them away to foreign gewgaws. The new spirit of nationalism, I fear, has come too late to help them.”

In a footnote, the writer adds,

“I think the Aiyangars must have come largely from Gujerat, a little more than 1000 years ago, for Gujerat was a centre for Bhagavatas, the original Vaishnavas. Gujerati women are likewise famous for their