Part 5: Kottar (Oct. 10)

Tirunelveli and Tuticorin (Oct. 11 - 12)

“We went in this way for two days to the great city of Kottar (kandhor)” In Sapir’s time, Kottar was “a town with considerable traffic, visited by merchants far and near” (The Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1908). Today Kottar is a market area within the larger city of Nagercoil.

our route to Kottar,arriving in early morning

… but first, morning tea and fried snacks

Kottar marketplace

“Here most kinds of work in the field and the road are done entirely with cattle, which are very big and of great strength, and they have a large fat back [hump] like a camel and they sway this way and that, and also large horns overlaid with brass….

There were some which the people of the land would venerate, exalting and honoring them and covering their horns with silver, and they do not do work with them because they are holy to them.”

Could Sapir have been referringto the Pongal harvest festival, when, on its third day, cows/oxen are decorated and venerated?

This was the suggestion of Dr. N. Muthumohan, of the School of Religions, Philosophy, & Humanist Thought, Madurai Kamaraj University – whom we visited on Oct. 15

(internet photos)

“All along this way [from Kottar to Tuticorin] is flat land and small hills, and all the land is full of seeds and tender shoots, and every kind of food tree, rice, sesame, and cotton, and every fruit of the tree.”

We traveled by train across flat red earth dotted with wind turbines, and past ranges of hills, to Tirunelveli

Sapir described the temple tower called gopuram in this way: “the roofs of their temples, all of them covered with graven images and gods of all kinds of tame and wild beast, bird, loathsome animal and creeping thing, and everything that is on the earth.”

The gopuram of Nellaiyappa temple in Tirunelveli(which Sapir may have seen on hisway to Tuticorin)

A gopuram is a wedge-shaped tower rising above a gateway into the temple.

“We went [from Kottar] to the great city of Tuticorin, which stands on the shore of the sea, and we arrived there on the day before the Sabbath of Parshat Matot, in the morning.”

[photos from Internet]

We traveled to Tuticorin by bus on a morning of unceasing rain (Oct. 12)

Sapir’s route to Calcutta:• July 22, 1860: He left Tuticorin by ship, going to Columbo, Ceylon• From Columbo by ship to Nagapattinam (Aug. 1-6)

• By ox-cart for three days north to Madras

• Eight days later, Sapir sailed by ship to Calcutta.