The only living white boy in Chennai

They’re fat. These people are all really, really fat. Obese and obscene, like plump sweaty sausages squeezing themselves through the doors of an air conditioned coach. Digital camera necklaces and sandal/sock combos. It’s like watching a Gary Larson cartoon come to life and squirm around on the tarmac.

I’m outside the San Thome Cathedral Bastillica in Chennai (formerly Madras), and a VIP bus has just pulled into the car park. After hiding in a corner, roughly for the duration of some over zealous tour guide rhetoric, the doors have opened and it’s overweight army are waddling into the sun. There’s something very uncomfortable about the whole exercise, but I’m transfixed. Glued to my front row seat for this evolutionary car crash derby.

Chennai is a good place to explore God, ‘whatever you conceive him to be’, and a multitude of faiths stream in on personal pilgrimages every day. I’m in the city researching religion for a book I’m writing, a one stop shop of today’s most fashionable religions, and San Thome Cathedral is first on my list.

Although linked to Rome, San Thome is smaller than I imagined it to be. A significant Christian site, the Cathedral Basticallica is the final resting place of Saint ‘Doubting’ Thomas, the only one of twelve who questioned his Lord’s death‘n’resurrection trick.

Apparently, after a quick look at Jesus’ wounds Thomas was finally convinced, and went out preaching about the foolish dip in faith he’d suffered. Sadly, before his change of heart could be officially verified, he died from an unfortunate spear though the back, but immortalised with a sainthood and the elaborate tomb I’m sitting outside. No one does PR like the church eh?

After San Thome I’m off to the Kapaleeswarar Temple, a renowned Hindi place of worship and one of Chennai’s busiest religious attractions. Kapaleeswarat was debatably built in the 7th century, by either the Pallova or Vijayanagara Empire, but with a 37m tall hand carved gopuram (Google it) who really cares?

Then it’s round the corner to the Universal Temple, my favourite name of the day, where the Sri Ramakrishna Math run around doing all the things that Hare Krishna’s do when they’re not flogging books, flowers and incense.

And for Chennai’s grand existential finale, it’s a short, ish, walk over the Adyar Bridge to the mysterious Theosophical Society International Headquarters. A worldwide organisation that, although sounding like a bond villain’s networking luncheon, petitions the globe aiming to ‘draw together people of goodwill whatever their religious opinions’ and ‘see every religion as an expression of Divine Wisdom and prefer its study to its condemnation’. Fair enough, sounds very sensible. Let’s see how well that’s working out for them then.

Chennai’s religious heritage is an obvious draw to the city, and tour operators cash in on redemption whenever they can. I have my reasons for being here, and these Air-Con anthropologists taking pictures of the bus they’ve just sat on, they no doubt have theirs. But before God blessed us all with brochures and guidebooks, India’s now 4th largest city has seen foreigners before, and some with much darker agendas.

Stay with me, a little background history…

Sitting on the Bay of Bengal, that’s down and to the right if you need a point of reference, Chennai was originally a cluster of small farming communities.

Domestic dynasties such as the Pallava, the Chola, the Pandya and Vijaynagar all had controlling interests in the region, before the British East India Trading Company were granted land by the Nayak of Vandavasi in 1693 to establish factories, trading routes and permanent settlement.

This was the beginning of the end for domestic control in Chennai, but even before the Brits turned up to, cough, cough, erm… trade, the Dutch and the Portuguese had already left their claw marks on the walls.

So when Queen Victoria finally got her slice of the pie, she quickly set her boys to work building Fort St George. The epicentre of the new colonial city, and a dramatic establishment of the crown’s presence in India.

For half a century Britannia ruled unchallenged. Then in 1746 those damn Frenchies decided to have a pop and succeeded in kicking the Empire’s ass. Three years and lots of dead bodies later, the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle gave control back to the British and sent the French down la rue to Pondicherry. A place south of Chennai that to this day has French road signs and baguettes on tap.

Independence gave Chennai back to India in 1947, and today it’s a manufacturing powerhouse and home to India’s second largest film industry, Kollywood. Europe’s legacy here was questionable. Lots of trade, religion and bloodshed, our foreign policy in a nutshell. But it also left new wealth, infrastructure and education. The pro’s and con’s of occupation creating both a moral see saw and a silent responsibility to understanding the city.

So sitting here, watching ‘the white man’ and his ‘burden’ get back into their tour bus, I can’t help but feel scorn for the detached way this group have chosen to ‘experience India’. Too scared to buy chai or talk to a stranger, I find it hard to see what they’ve gained from coming here at all. Sure, they have their pictures, they have their stories, they have something to boast about when they watch Slumdog Millionaire. But from Chennai, from today, all they’ve really left with are digital stills of an old statue in a Plexiglas case.