Then we drove on to where grew a gigantic Banyan tree—eighty feet in girth, and having quite a small forest around its central vast trunk of offshoots—new trees which had rooted themselves in the earth from the parent branches. It was rather suggestive of a many pillared sylvan temple.
After this we reached the Palace of Tiramala, which stood at the head of a large village—an imposing structure in stucco, mostly yellow washed. The enormous columns of the court looked out of proportion to the arches they supported, which were of a rather debased Mogul type, heavy with very elaborate grotesque ornamentation in stucco in the spandrils and on the ceilings, many of which had as a central device a large lotus flower formally treated as a rosette, and in some instances elaborately painted. The effect of the whole building was rather weird, and suggested a rather queer architectural nightmare, in which massive Norman cathedral piers had swallowed Roman Doric ones, or vice versa, and a Hindu modeller had broken up some Mogul arches, and fastened them together again with grotesque elephants and dragons’ teeth.
The palace was now used as law courts, and it was curious to see two modern oil portraits of two neat English lawyers hanging on the walls of these vast columned halls.
We next visited a native shop in the village bazaar where the fine muslins and silks of the district were made and sold. We were duly seated in chairs and fanned by boys, while an active brown member of the firm unfolded tempting saris, pugarees, and silk stuffs, some beautifully brocaded with gold thread, and of course we possessed ourselves of a few specimens.
In this district there is a thriving native silk industry, hand-weaving, also dyeing, and the ingenious native craft of making patterns on cottons and muslins by tying and dipping. Hanks of cotton and silk may be seen hung out over bamboo poles placed horizontally, and ox-carts roll by filled with the dyed skeins. There is a fine dark rich red, frequently seen in the sari dress of the women, also a dark purple. The women here generally wear the dark red sari with a narrow border of black; in some cases the sari is black with a red border.
In the village street we saw a little native bride drawn in a carriage.
Returning to the city in the cool of the evening we stopped at the temple bazaar and bought some zebu bells—curious little pear-shaped brass bells, each with a different tone, which are hung round the animals’ necks. Their foreheads, too, are frequently bound with strings of beads, or shells fixed on leather bands, and their horns are painted green or red.
There is a method of decorating the centres of the dining tables in Southern India which, I think, we first noticed at the hotel at Madras, or at one of the refreshment stations on the Coromandel coast. It consists in arranging dyed sago seeds in patterns forming a table centre on the white cloth. At the station refreshment room at Madura there was a more elaborate example done by means of stencils—a border of yellow enclosed a lightly powdered filling, and an effective outer border was produced by a repeated sprig of a red rose with green leaves. The general effect was that of an embroidered pattern, but of course it was liable to slight displacements, and was constantly done afresh, one of the waiters being the special artist.
We left Madura on the 15th of February for Tuticorin.
