A Portrait of Gokarna

Like a wintering bird, Vadim Ivanovich migrates every November to the warmth of a small town on the western coast of India. He stuffs a suitcase with Darya Dontsova’s detective novels, jars of varenye (a whole berry preserve) and two pairs of loafers. Clothes? “I go from wearing winter coats to bermudas. I think this is what they call shape-shifting.” Ivanovich locks up his apartment in St Petersburg, where he works as a nurse and a part-time babysitter, to spend four months in a musty hilltop room in Gokarna. Rooms are prisons, he says, when I sit him down for a soda on Om Beach, the name supposedly derived from the shape of the coastline. But in Gokarna, escape is always at hand—the solitude of craggy beaches, the indolence of youth, it is all just a short walk away. Three weeks into his stay, 25-year-old Ivanovich, sandy-haired and suntanned, enjoys his daily hike to Paradise, a small rocky beach where he swims, reads and sunbathes for four hours in the morning. There is no phone network, and pineapples are about the only food you can buy. “Isn’t it perfect?,” Ivanovich says. “No one cares about you or asks you what you do. You can do nothing, and become nothing…” The words, trailing off into a murmur, and the slack gaze make me wonder if he is under the influence. Because isolated beaches aren’t the only reason Gokarna has become the backpackers’ version of paradise. In the half-tones of dusk, as the bubbler crabs emerge from their burrows, so do drug peddlers, offering you weed by the gram, acid, even ketamine if you are White and alone.

Gokarna is the Pushkar of Karnataka, an ancient temple town with a population of about 25,000 that attracts pilgrims, troops of vagabonds, dissolute tourists and wannabe hippies, arguably in equal measure. The tiny peninsula purportedly shaped like a cow’s ear—hence the name Gokarna—is all but detached from the mainland by the Gangavali and the Aghanashini, rivers that originate in the Western Ghats and twist about the region creating beautiful estuaries. Shiva was the reigning deity of this liminal landscape before tourists came along. Quiz locals about the history of their town and they will promptly regurgitate mythology, starting with the story of Vishnu and Ganapati hoodwinking Ravana, who had received the powerful atma-linga as a boon from Shiva, to install it at Gokarna. ‘The ten-headed one came to Gokarna, the undisturbed, beloved place of the spear-bearer Shiva,’ says the Mahabharata. The area around Mahabaleshwara temple, a short walk from Gokarna Beach, is a riot of activity. Halakki Vokkaliga tribals, their saris knotted at the neck, leaving their straight backs bare, hawk flowers for the gods. Brahmin women sweep their homes clean and sketch powdery kolams on wet earth. The Yajur Veda, with a faintly Maharashtrian intonation, wafts out of a 150-year-old home with wood balconies. But these rituals pale in comparison to the cosmetics of Indian culture—handmade baskets, earthenware, cheap cotton clothes and cheaper gifts—on offer at the pop-up stalls lining the main street. Indeed, the real Gokarna, pious and laidback, seems to live in the shadow of the great seductive tourist machine that has the town in its thrall.

“White people started coming in the early 70s,” says 78-year- old Venkataramana Hegde, a small man with a white moustache, his hair slicked back from his vibhuti-striped forehead. “And now, they just keep coming, like waves, pushing oldtimers inland.” He lives in the middle of a grove of bamboo and flowering trees behind Kudle Beach and owns prime land in the area, but you wouldn’t know it, not from his banian and striped boxers. A row of cottages, with about 25 rooms for guests, shares the compound presently strewn with striking pink rose apple blossoms. Back in 1969, Hegde bought 22 acres near Kudle Beach for a sum of Rs 8,000 or so. Now a 10 by 10 metre plot here costs Rs 2 lakh, he says with a lopsided smile, as though secretly delighting in his own enterprise and ingenuity. Locals say Hegde was the first to host foreigners and build rooms for them—at the risk of being alienated from Hindu society. “That guy over there, David Wilson, we call him maali (gardener),” he says, pointing out a barechested man in a short, threadbare dhoti. “The English bastard came in 1971 and I took him in at a time when I did not even have chai to offer. Together we built a house for him to stay in for three months in a year. I have chased him out thrice but David returns every year. Technically, I own the building and he pays rent.” How much? “Ah, that I can’t tell you, can I? See, when I started making a lot of money, I decided to tear up my account books. It’s all in my head,” he says, winking.

Hegde is a shrewd businessman, with interests spanning agriculture— he grows two or three tonnes of paddy a year, 10,000 coconuts and three quintals of areca nut—tourism and real estate, and plans to expand into organic products. His life intimately mirrors the story of the town, beginning at the temple, where he worked as a head helper of sorts for 18 years, earning 50 paise a day, before moving on, and up. “I was sick of the politics. My father served at the temple and I got his job. We remained poor. My wife and I decided enough was enough. We bought land at Kudle—the name comes from the union of Shiva and Parvati—and carried water in buckets and built this house with our own hands,” he says, seated at his porch, leaning in to hear better. Over 30 years ago, when he taught himself English and made friends with foreigners, the people of the town stopped inviting him home. Over time, a steady trickle of European tourists—and the arbitrating power of money—has coaxed Gokarna into shedding its inhibitions and forging a symbiosis. Today, many Brahmin households host a guest or two in their spare bedrooms for Rs 200-300 a day. Cafés that line the beaches feature oatmeal, pancakes and Heinz baked beans on their menus. Shacks offer long-stay rates; sea-view resorts inevitably have rule-sheets in Russian; ads for yoga classes, hair braids and old Royal Enfields mar public walls.

At least one half of this small, coastal economy depends on the flotilla of tourists, if you include food, rooms, services like yoga and ferries. But this otherness of Gokarna, this awkward coalition, lasts only for four months in a year, from November to March. Hegde spends the monsoon months painting larger- than-life saturated-colour likenesses of Hindu deities, in calendar art style, on his walls. “I am also working on an autobiography,” he says. His life has come full circle, after all. From building a guesthouse for Europeans and running a restaurant on Kudle Beach in the early years, Hegde says he no longer needs the money from tourism. “I make enough for the family (he has seven sons and daughters, and all but two work in the fields) from farming and leases.” He only entertains loyal clients these days, “friends”, he says, not characters you glimpse on a bus, never to see them again.

When it is hot and sweltering, the locals are like actors out of work; they turn observers of themselves. Between snoozes they dream of a time when they did not have to lock their doors, when Konkani-speaking fishermen dried their fish on the shore, when catfish and water snakes competed with young boys swimming the length of the Kotitheertha, a rectangular pond that is now overrun by scum. “On warm nights, I slept on the beach, making a bed with sand and spreading a straw mat over it. Now you would get mugged,” says Narayan S Hosmane, a cancer research scientist and a distinguished professor at Northern Illinois University. “As a boy, I found solitude in a secret place between two mountains near Ramatheertha. I doubt you will find yourself alone anywhere in Gokarna today.” Hosmane’s nostalgia is due in part to his long absence from home. He left the town in 1964 to study chemistry in Dharwad, and went on to get a PhD from Edinburgh University. “A part of me still lives in Gokarna,” he says, over a long, animated call from Illinois. A Havyaka Brahmin—a community that is said to have been brought here from north India over 1,300 years ago by the Kadamba king Mayooravarma to perform rituals— who received a Sanskrit education, he often finds himself quoting ancient epigrams in the course of teaching a chemistry class. Even now, he likes his food sour, because, he says, he grew up eating leftovers his mother brought home after cooking at several houses. They lived in a modest house on ratha beedhi—car street—along which a giant chariot carries the Lord of Gokarna in a procession on Shivaratri. “Everyone was poor those days. The question was, who was poorer,” he says. “With tourism, there is money, but Gokarna has lost its character.”

It is also losing its youth to the professional mobility of Bengaluru and Mumbai. They leave ageing parents behind in their tile-roofed homes, in a Gokarna that is always changing in tonality, always in dissonance with itself.

“There is a lot of demand for home nurses,” says Dr SV Jathar, an 80-something Ayurvedic practitioner who lives in a 200-year-old house attached to Venkataramana temple. Having just walked in through a dark, narrow arch in the market area, and swung open a pair of saloon doors, I marvel at the long, perfectly still courtyard that has magically materialised in front of me. It separates Jathar’s two-storeyed house and the temple fortified with new window grilles. In a cool receiving room awash with living beams of sunlight, Jathar says he briefly ran a programme to train nurses.

“There are no old-age homes in Gokarna. We keep building restaurants and yoga halls for visitors. For locals, the quality of life hasn’t improved by much. The roads, too, are widened selectively with tourism in mind. If anything, prices of groceries and essentials have gone up with the rise in disposable income,” he says, pausing in his examination of a child with colic. He reassures the mother, speaking in lilting old- world Kannada interspersed with Tulu. Designated head priests of the Venkataramana temple, the Marathi-speaking Jathars must have migrated to Gokarna at around the same time as the Havyakas, he says. “Our family name is part of the list of priests we have from Mayooravarma’s time. Even now, we are first in line to perform pujas at the temple, although other priests have been employed. I studied to be a doctor, but in parallel, I learned the Vedas. My sons did the same, and fortunately, one of them elected to be a full-time priest here.”

Tourism has been good for Gokarna’s social equity, Jathar says. “Many Brahmins have built bigger houses; they even run restaurants now. The community that has benefited the most, though, is [that of] farmers. After land reform legislation, they became the owners of a lot of land around Gokarna and put it to good use when the tourists came,” he says. Govinda Gowda, who owns Namaste, a popular café and hotel on Om Beach, is a rich, elusive man today. Among the first to ride the tourist wave, he made large sums of money from what used to be wasteland. The Namaste group has since expanded and built other properties overlooking the sea. “They were modest farmers. The boy did not do well at school, but look where he is now. All because he was at the right place at the right time. No one has lucked out like he did,” says an oldtimer, requesting anonymity. Gokarna is still a small, conservative town, and people won’t miss an opportunity to fluff their feathers, but not at the cost of relationships.

In his 45 years as a physician in Gokarna, Dr VR Mallan says he must have entered every door in his part of town. “Those days, people paid Rs 5 or Rs 10 for a house call. My Ambassador was the first car in town and my driver ran errands for friends and family. I feel odd in today’s Gokarna,” he says, tucking a wad of paan into his cheek before settling down to see patients at his clinic in an old house.

Sitting across the table from him is Shankar Bhat, who is here as much to consult him as to catch up. A flamboyant priest from Pune, Bhat is in town for a wedding in the family. His 40,000 sq ft ancestral home, located between the main temple and the beach, provided food and shelter to pilgrims back when there were no hotels in Gokarna. “Gokarna was a village. When it turned into a town, I moved to another,” he says, his precious earrings and maalas announcing his profession and his affluence. The Bhat-Joglekar home continues to host students of Sanskrit and fosters Veda adhyayana (study).

For all the tourism, Gokarna hasn’t disengaged from tradition. In fact, there has never been a better time to be a priest in Gokarna. In the Joshi household on Car Street, Vidvaan Ganesh Joshi, 70, is preparing to leave for a puja. “Foreigners may have popularised Gokarna, but the proportion of Indian tourists is on the rise now, which means that priests are forever in demand for performing havan, shanti, Rudra puja, etcetera. And they are in limited supply, only about 200 priests,” he says. The ancient Sanskrit college in town is in a state of decline, but that hasn’t deterred Brahmin families. “Originally, there were 400 Brahmin households in town and they all learned the Vedas and the Shastras. Every Havyaka family still sends at least a son each to one of the vidvaans in town. Some of them may then opt to continue their religious study, but most leave Gokarna to go to college and get employment,” says the vidvaan’s son, Shankar Joshi, 29. “Of late, though, there have been many instances of graduate boys returning to Gokarna to continue their Vedic studies. My own brother, when he couldn’t find a good job in Bangalore, came back and became a priest.”

Vidvaan Joshi hops on to a colleague’s scooter, ready for the day’s first puja. “The days we don’t work, we don’t get paid. It is a daily struggle,” he says, waving as the two- wheeler snakes down the road. Across the street, a building with a yellow arch that used to be the main bus stand advertises computer classes. Back in the cool, dark house, as I chat with Shankar Joshi about Gokarna Brahmins, a cow suddenly walks into the narrow sitting room and goes out the back. “When I was a boy, there were more cows on this street than people of other castes,” Joshi says. “No one here will sell their home, no matter how much money you offer; it is all they have to bind them to the Havyaka community and its traditions. Do you know that almost every house has a linga?”

Gokarna is not just a Brahminical town; “It has always been a crucible of plurality,” says Jayant Kaikini, a Kannada poet and lyricist who grew up here. His father, Gourish Kaikini, was a respected writer and teacher known for his atheistic views. “He was the first to translate Karl Marx into Kannada. And he was held in high regard in Gokarna. The town has always had a culture of respecting different opinions,” he says. The people of Gokarna were known for their hospitality even before tourism surged, says MM Upadhyay, a journalist and a priest who lives in ‘Mabla House’ on Ramatheertha Road, behind Gokarna’s main beach—perhaps the dirtiest stretch of sand in the region. “During the British Raj, when royals visited Gokarna, my grandfather procured sugar especially for them. It was brought on an elephant from a neighbouring district,” he says. In 1971, Upadhyay started building huts of coconut- palm in his front yard, letting them out for Rs 10 a night. He has since converted the front portion of his house into 20 small rooms. “I charge Rs 150-250 a room,” he says, offering me spiced soda in the inner courtyard of his home. Boxes and backpacks are scattered about; a storeroom with its door ajar has piles of mattresses. Yet, like most other homestays in Gokarna, his lodgings are considered illegal by the government. “There is no support for tourism, no infrastructure. Despite the lack of good healthcare and streetlights, foreigners come because people like us are willing to give them rooms. They are not rich, they cannot afford hotels. And they take care to dress decently while in town. In fact, some owners prefer foreign tenants to Indians because they will pay up,” he says.

The sky roars like a surly cat as I walk seaward, past Mahabaleshwara temple, where foreigners are not allowed, to Prema Restaurant, a time-honoured establishment on Gokarna Beach that serves Indian and American favourites. Paul Kovalenko, a 34-year-old Ukrainian musician on his first visit to Gokarna, laughs when I ask him if he is having a good time.

“I have heard Hampi is friendlier towards backpackers, and Goa has better ambience although it is expensive. I came to Gokarna for the sea… the people are snobs,” he says, in halting English. Kovalenko chose his destination to suit a tight holiday budget— Rs 250 a day—and on most days, he spends even less. “I am saving for Hampi. I will leave in two weeks, I hope,” he says.

The friction is evident at Kotitheertha, the once-clean tank with a perimeter of picturesque old Brahmin homes where residents appear to live in a time warp of sorts, their affectation of learning and wisdom tipped by scorn for the incubus of Western culture. “Gokarna has become some kind of asylum for scantily clad foreigners. Boys used to play hockey on the beaches. Now, they can’t, it is too embarrassing,” says Ganapathi Hire, a Sanskrit scholar, scrunching his face.

“The foreigners who came in the beginning were interested in Indian culture; they desired knowledge. Gokarna was not just a place of leisure. People used to read those days,” says 85-year-old Ganapathy Vedeshwar. I pause to catch my breath after trudging up Ramatheertha hill to arrive at the newly-painted blue building housing his library. It has been days since anyone dropped in for a look at his 70,000 books, collected over the course of 60 years. Vedeshwar moved here after the commute to and from his family home in town proved strenuous. Astonishingly frail and hard of hearing, the librarian can nevertheless recall when pilgrims started frequenting Gokarna. “I was a boy of about 15 when the first bus arrived here, from Kumta. There was so much joy at being connected to the rest of India,” he says. “Now we are connected to the world.”

The clouds disperse and it is sunny as ever in Gokarna. Down south, at Kudle Beach, a palisade of coconut palms and shacks surrounds the sea. Doused in golden light, young men and women lounge in their swimwear, sunning their backs. A group of college boys from Kerala watch with interest, scattering like rabbits at the sight of S Veerappa, a policeman patrolling the beach, mostly to advise people against swimming in the sea. “Over a dozen people have died at Gokarna’s beaches in the past couple of years,” says Veerappa. Foreigners, though, seem to be exempt from this rule, presumably because they are thought to be good swimmers.

I walk to the far end of the beach and take the long route to Hegde’s house via a resort under construction. Disastrously, I walk in on him smoking up with Wilson and another guest. They skip out in haste, leaving an annoyed Hegde alone with me. “I smoke occasionally,” he concedes, even sharing a murky story from his past. About two decades ago, Hegde spent 10 months in prison— a “drugs case”, he says. “Because I get money transfers from foreigners, I was accused of supplying drugs to them. But I am a god- fearing man. I keep copies of the Shiva Purana for visitors to read. I even know some astrology,” he says, showing me his rudraksha beads. “In the end, I was proved innocent. Ever since, I am known as an ‘international man’ with friends across the world.” That, right there, is the story of Gokarna’s ambiguous identity. Much joy and heartache run through its ancient capillaries. It is not only a world of sun and sand, but also of depth and darkness.

GokarnaNamaste CaféOm beachreligiontempleVenkataramana Hegde