Courtney McGrailby Dervla Murphy
Dervla Murphy’s account of a walk down Grafton Street would be worth reading. Since the 1960s, when she famously cycled full tilt from Lismore to India, she has been writing about her life and journeys, and has been justly acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest travel writers.
On a Shoestring to Coorg was written in the mid-1970s. It has just been reissued in an elegant paperback by her new publisher, Eland, an admirable firm dedicated to good books, old and new, that display a ‘spirit of place’. The recent elections in India are seen by many as ushering a period of change in India. This book will given readers a brilliant idea not of the world industry power, but the village India that is still the life of millions.
Coorg is an ancient hill province, a little to the north of ‘Ooty’, Ootacamund, the resort in the Nilgiri Hills, where India’s British administrators and their families used to relax during the hot season, as Indian officials do now.
Dervla, who has been wandering, a little aimlessly perhaps, south from Bombay in the company of her five-year-old daughter Rachel, falls for the area’s friendliness, its beauty, and its spiritual self-sufficiency. After reaching the southern tip of the subcontinent they return to Coorg, where they remain for the rest of their stay in India.
To western eyes, the variety of religious experience in Indian thought and practice is both bizarre and complex, and Dervla does a good job telling Rachel (and the reader) about them. Even still, over breakfast one morning, Rachel announces brightly, “I think I’m too young to understand Hinduism. Will you explain it again when I’m eight?”
Experiences
And it is not just Hinduism: on the Coromandel Coast they witness a ‘service’ held by some Tamil brand of hysterical Christianity that is so disturbing that Rachel has to be hastily bustled out of the building.
But the core of this luminous book is Coorg. During their two months there, both mother and daughter form friendships which lead to experiences that no mere tourist could hope for. Thus we witness Hindu dances and Catholic prayers, and are made privy to a wedding, a naming ceremony and a funeral.
By the end of the book, the reader is awed by the resilience of humanity. One can only admire a people who can remain functional, even cheerful, among the confusions, horrors and deprivations that make up life in this teeming environment.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that India, as Mother Christine of the Good Shepherd Order remarks to Dervla, “is the most prayerful country in the world”.