Tourism Helping India’s Temple Dancers

As the sun sets over the Arabian Sea, Hindu temple dancers with garishly painted faces, wearing huge skirts and headdresses, perform ancient tales of India on a hotel rooftop before sunburned tourists.

The dancers are presenting in pantomime one of the 100,001 episodes of the Mahabharata, India’s great epic of love and war, men and gods.

Tourism is giving a boost to the Kathakali dance troupe, one of many such groups that are finding it hard to survive these days on temple work alone.

Tourism also is working subtle changes in traditional lifestyles in Kovalam, long a favorite of Western bohemians taking a break from ashrams and gurus on the old hippie enlightenment trail through India.

Tucked away in the southern tip of India in the Communist-ruled state of Kerala, Kovalam has lovely beach coves, coconut tree jungles, cheap seafood restaurants and cozy hotels.

Hippies still hang out at the main beach. But the audience watching the Kathakali mime dancers under the stars looks more like the kind of free-spending yuppie adventure travelers that Neptune Hotel owner B.K. Das is looking for.

“The hippies are vanishing. Efforts are on to promote up-market tourism,” Das said in an interview.

But Kalamandalam Sivarajan, director of the Kathakali dance troupe, still has to walk the beach by day, handing out leaflets to sunbathing tourists.

“I am contacting 30 or 40 temples all the time, but so are dozens of other troupes,” said Sivarajan, who studied for eight years to learn the 500 gestures of Kathakali. “There are only a few major festivals a year. Money is sometimes a problem.”

A Kathakali performance is supposed to last all night. But Sivarajan, whose troupe toured West Germany last year, gives two-hour abridged versions for foreign audiences.

Local people at first objected to having sacred dances performed in a setting where most women sunbathers are topless and marijuana smoke often wafts on the sea breezes.

“But opposition is reducing because Kathakali has become famous after performing before tourists,” said Venu Gopal, a Kerala tourism official.

Kovalam remains primarily a fishing community.

Every morning dozens of men heave on ropes pulling in big mango wood fishing canoes, trailing nets bulging with kingfish and tuna. They guide the boats through rocks, swimmers and sunbathers to a clear spot of beach.

During the November to February tourist season, Manoharan paddles tourists around the coves in a boat made of four rubber tree logs tied together and using a piece of bamboo for an oar.

“Tourists are all the time smiling, having fun, spending money,” Manoharan said. “Sure it makes us happy too.” He makes twice as much money on tourists as he does diving off rocks for oysters in the off-season, he said.

Kerala has long been known for its Ayurvedic medicine, the homeopathic science practiced in India for more than 2,000 years, and Kovalam has plenty of herbal massage clinics.

“You will be taking the massage of the gods,” Ayurvedic doctor Chandhra Babu tells a visitor in his beachside clinic.

Babu gives up to 20 herbal oil massages a day to sun-fried Western tourists. He has no Indian clientele.

“Indian people already do this in their homes,” he said, kneading hot oil into a visitor’s back. “Why should they pay money to me?”

Babu returns each evening to his village clinic outside Kovalam to dispense herbal medicines to his local patients.

Kovalam is off the beaten tourist path. Of the 1 million foreigners who visited India in 1988, only 52,000 came to Kerala state and about half of those came to the beach resort, state officials said.

The Marxist Democratic Front government aims to double that number in the next five years by trying what communist governments elsewhere are doing--free enterprise.