Gardens of Kerala

A year or so back I posted an album of photos from Egypt made almost a decade earlier with a small "consumer zoom" camera: the Olympus ZX-1. Now a second album with that tiny camera: this time from the highlands of the Indian state of Kerala in the south-west of the continent, January 2012.

I wanted to visit South India because I had taken a course on Indian culture and history with the great Arthur Basham at the Australian National University in Canberra in the late 1980s. South India is the centre of a Hindu culture distinct from the Mughal-influenced north, whose religious practices — particularly the caste-independent devotional practices of the bhakti cults — had interested me. I wanted to see the great temples of the South.

I found a Delhi-based travel agent who arranged a tailor-made tour with a car and driver and local guides at many stops. It was a great itinerary. But South India (we spent most of the time in Tamil Nadu and Kerala) was a shock for its public poverty and dysfunction, despite private wealth. The temples I had planned to visit proved dark, noisy and vaguely infernal rather than transcendent.

India is proverbially, however, a place of strong contrasts. The highlands of Kerala in the Western Ghats mountain range were a favourite temperate resort for the English during the Raj. Their main interest for a tourist remains the dramatic difference between the humid, tropical, urbanised, trashy and crowded coastal plains of Kerala and the rolling, green hills, rich gardens and brilliant skies of the highlands.

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