Coromandel Quotes

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts”
― Charles Allen, Coromandel: A Personal History of South India

“It is under Ashoka’s aegis that Indian civilisation, in the sense of a shared culture embracing everything from administration to art and architecture, makes a great leap forward, with tolerance as its watchword. One of his edicts is entirely devoted to this subject, with the great emperor under his regnal name of Piyadasi calling on his subjects to respect all religions. It ends with these words: Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought ‘Let me glorify my own religion’, only harms his own religion.”
― Charles Allen, Coromandel: A Personal History of South India

“This travelling was never about gaining merit or the absolution of sins. It was always the journey that mattered, and what these travels could tell me about the country and its history – a history so alluring, so epic as to keep drawing me back. There is so damn much of it, and so much still unexamined, still disputed, still buried and waiting to be brought back into the light.”
― Charles Allen, Coromandel: A Personal History of South India

“The role played by women in history is as underwritten in India as anywhere, so it is only right to end with a mention of another woman of Kerala whose part in its history has only recently been publicly recognised. Her name was Velathu Lakshmikutty and she died in 2013 at the fine old age of 102 (see page 297). In 1952 she organised and led a march by women against the Manimalarkavu temple in Velur, Cochin, which – unbelievable as it seems to us today – was still requiring avarna women like herself to attend the Manimalarkavu pooram spring festival with breasts exposed. The protest that she led finally brought that particularly shaming form of caste discrimination to an end, although it serves as a reminder that the oppression of the powerless by the powerful is far from being a thing of the past.”
― Charles Allen, Coromandel: A Personal History of South India

“As they approached Dhauli the elephant refused to go forward; nothing that Mark or the mahout did could persuade her to cross the open ground in front of them. Only then did Mark learn that they had come to the Kalinga battlefield, on which hundreds of war elephants are said to have died.”
― Charles Allen, Coromandel: A Personal History of South India

“The most spectacular example of continental drift and tectonic plate movement has to be the Indian Plate, a triangle of geomorphic crust which aeons ago broke away from the single supercontinent of Gondwanaland to drift north-eastwards across the globe. As it slid so it scraped over magmatic hotspots, releasing stupendous amounts of volcanic gases and lava – a catastrophic venting that may well have contributed towards the extinction of the greater dinosaurs but most certainly created the layers of thick lava topped by granite boulders that make up much of the triangular tableland known as the Indian Plate, which the Arya (of whom I have a lot more to say in a later chapter) named the Deccan (derived from the Sanskrit dakshina, ‘south country’).”
― Charles Allen, Coromandel: A Personal History of South India