Mysore, Karnataka 10 November 2009

I arrived in Mysore, Karnataka early this morning via the Ajmer-Mysore Express. The train's name belies its habit of slowly creeping to-and-fro between the North and the South of India. Like the first time I returned from the north to a more southerly Pune, Maharashtra nearly a year ago, already today there is a much greater sense of homey comfort in Mysore.
Early in the morning at 4:15 9 November, the train arrived at platform 2 of Pune Station. I boarded and stowed my luggage. It happened a family of four was to occupy the berth across from my single, and their company over the twenty-eight hour journey south brought many smiles, pleasant exchanges, and an invitation to Madikeri, the source of the holy river Kaveri. Satish, the father, tells me Madikeri is the "Switzerland of India." I'll take this to mean it's hilly or mountainous, green, and breathtaking. Not too different from the description I'd offer the countryside of Karnataka from the views during my long trainride. Similar, in a way, to my first journey south from Delhi to Pune, the terrain just keeps becoming more and more luscious, alive but moistfully demure.
I have received a tip from a Columbia Art History student to stay at the Dasaprakash, the light of the slave, hotel. It's relatively cheap at 315 rupees/day, clean, hospitable, and with a desk and a chair I was sold on my stay. Though how much spare time I'll have to spend in that particular model of desk and chair is yet to be seen. I suppose I'll get a good few hours in tonight after this post.
In a new place, I have a number of things to explore and contacts to be made. My frist two orders of business are to contact the former director of The Central Institute of Indian Languages and meet with him. (Done, details follow) I will begin as soon as possible lessons in Kannada, the language of Karnataka. It's script and grammar are quite different from the dominant Nagari script of Hindi, Marathi, and numerous other North Indian languages, not to mention Sanskrit. However, one finds Sanskrit written in all varieties of script, depending upon the region and time period of a text's composition. Nagari script is historically relatively new; but Kannada's script dates farther back into early medieval Indian history. More than this (and why I am so keen to begin my long study of the language), Kannada literature records an awareness of time from this early date that did not exist in other Indian languages as they came to auto-reflexively understand themselves as constituting a regional place (the exception here may be Tamil, a subject I am not knowledgable in). More on this over the coming months, I am sure.
Today's breakfast consisted of two types of rice--both subtly different and exquisitely tasty--along with black coffee, to whose strength even I have to adjust.
Now, following breakfast I made two phone calls: 1) Dr. Raja Purohit and 2) Dr. Nagaraja Rao; they both graciously agreed to meet me today at their home and The Oriental Research Institute of Mysore, respectively. Having met with them now, it seems I will be studying Sanskrit grammar (vyakaran), poetry (kavya), and poetic science (kavyashastra) with Dr. Rao 4-5 hours a week; Dr. Purohit is kindly assisting me in matters of meeting a teacher of Kannada. Both, fortunately for me, are helping in matters of long-term housing. I may, finally, get that homestay I have been craving... News to come, surely.
The Oriental Research Institute of Mysore, where I am sitting now, is an old, elegant building just beyond the city's center. It took me about one hour's explorative meandering, successively asking directions from different different people to arrive in its library. The manuscript collection seems incredible, but one can't know whether its contents will weather the tropical climate here in the South of India. Years ago--perhaps decades or centuries--it would be incumbent upon young students of language to copy texts and thereby both learning how masters craft the language and preserving the material for future generations. Nowadays, unfortunately, the study of ancient pasts is out of fashion and attracts little attention from serious students in India.
The sky is clearing now and the air smells sweet, the fragrance of some flower meandering as I was not so long ago--it resting in my nose and I in a library--both to give pleasure to the creations of some unknown maker. Taking time to understand what it is they record, our respective reactions, that is--me to the scent and the texts to me--each one, the flower and myself, attempting to understand what it is the object of delight records, and think about how its use in the present might help to propagate its life and beauty.
The bag resting in my lap holds a round-trip ticket to Bangalore for tomorrow morning 6:45. It's a good thing I like bhaaratiiya rail! I am to visit the Vedanta bookstore nearby Uma cinema hall and have a field day amongst my flowers--Sanskrit books. I'll sit and read them, probably in that very O.R.I. library, over the course of months. They'll become for me like the flower for the bee, each one without the other would wander aimlessly about; but with each other our wanderings at least have some complex purpose, the intricate geometries of which I am only now coming to understand.