To Vande Maharashtra on Indian Railways

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Parent Category: Travel Info

Category: Travel Feature

Published on Sunday, 20 March 2011 17:25

Written by Caroline Martin

For a budget adventure, there is nothing like a couple of days on Indian Railways..

One recent October, the combined forces of a railway accident and Indian bureaucratic mix-up led to my taking an enforced leisurely ride from central Kerala to Maharashtra. Normally there is a 24-hour express train, but since a mishap in May, the Konkan line was closed for repair.

So I had to take the looooonnnnng -- that is, more than 40 hours -- local train trip. It was the proverbial Slow Boat to China, through an array of landscapes and languages hinting at just a fraction of India's diversity.

The first seven hours of the train ride pass through the lush, verdant coconut-tree forests of Kerala, then through the foothills of the Western Ghat mountains. The Ghats look alarmingly like those of my native Tennessee -- gentle, green and sloping, except that the valleys hold fresh spring-green rice paddies, banana trees and tapioca farms, not fields of tobacco and cotton, or shopping malls and parking lots.

On the Kerala/Tamil Nadu border, we reach the Ghats proper. The land is dramatic -- mountains become wildly misshapen hills like those in Chinese watercolors, warped green gumdrops welling up out of the steamy earth.

It's a magical stretch that's all too brief. After Ettimadai, the terrain alters drastically. Trees begin to vanish in the suddenly encroaching presence of The Sun - we're now in Tamil Nadu. Lettering on the sign-boards changes abruptly from the fat, squiggly, playful curlicues of Malayalam (if a kid invented an alphabet solely for the purpose of fun, it would look like Malayalam) to the more upright, rigid cuneiform of Tamil (Malayalam's ancient ancestor and the granddaddy language of south India). Watching the green slip away, I bid "Pinne Kannam" (Malayalam for "see you later") to "God's Own Country."

After the clean, green hills of Kerala and the Indonesia feeling of their spare, wooden-roofed temples, Tamil Nadu is another world. Vannakam (welcome!). The land is hard and red, the sun and colours brighter. Baroque figures from Hindu legend suddenly spring from roadside shrines.

As the sun sets behind the Technicolor wedding-cake forms of Tamil temple spires, I fall asleep to the vendors' calls of "choy, choy...cap-eeee, cap-eee" (chai, coffee) - and awaken, 12 hours later, in the harsh, red, arid landscape of Andhra Pradesh.

It's a seemingly endless state that knows no winter (and very little water). Even through the solar-guarded darkened train windows you can feel the oppressive glare of the sun. With the rocky hills in the distance and yucca-type vegetation, Andhra resembles the setting of a Western. This rural region is home to a political movement, demanding to be recognized as the independent state of Telengana.

The Andhra language (Telugu) is as musical and flowing as the landscape is dry and hard; the script itself looks like words on a 60's Fillmore psychedelic poster. Seemingly every word ends in a vowel (usually “oo”), which has led to Telugu being dubbed "the Italian of the East."

Here in Telengana, the ubiquitous angry buzzing of motor-scooters, burly Tata trucks and mini-cars falls away, to be replaced by bullock-drawn produce carts with wooden wheels, piloted by ebony men with drooping mustaches and sweaty heads in turbans.

The humped Zebu cattle (called Brahma Bulls in the west) move with ponderous grace. These scenes have remain unchanged for centuries, if not a couple millennia. It became a surprise to even see the occasional scrawny telephone wire strung across the dusty plains.

Maharashtra: another state, another landscape, another culture, another cuisine, another language, another alphabet. The diversity of India is almost attention-deficit in quality and quantity; I began to feel as though I was constantly flipping channels.

For instance, even if I were to master Hindi, which I can read but not fully understand, the locals can always switch to Marathi or Urdu, both commonly spoken here. Though Maharashtra (literally "great state") is technically part of the South, the influence of North India is more evident here in style of dress, cuisine, and number of Hindi speakers.

My destination is Pune (pronounced POO-nuh). Pune's official slogan is "City of Festivals," but they should consider "The nice city with the silly name"). Pune is reknowned as a centre of education for centuries, with a number of highly-regarded universities, colleges and institutes and a breezier climate than that of nearby Mumbai (Bombay).

As luck would have it, I arrived on Mahatma Gandhi's Birthday. "Vande mataram" (hail to the Motherland), the national anthem, blared from many a streetcorner, and photos of the Mahatma greeted me from seemingly every shop as I disembarked onto the railway platform.

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