Tranquebar: A Season in South India

by Georgina Harding

Georgina Harding spent a single day in Tranquebar in 1980. The memory of it haunted her and ten years later she went to live there for a season, accompanied by her small son. The history of Tranquebar is a microcosm of that of south India. It was a fishing villiage on the Coromandel coast, a roadstead port for first Tamil and later Moslem traders. Around 1620 an envoy of the King of Denmark acquired it as one of a handful of Danish colonies on the spice route, and 200 years later the Danes abandoned it to Britain and to India. The Danish interlude left a couple of streets in colonial style, a baroque gate, a fort on the beach and a Protestant mission. For the rest, Tranquebar is just a coastal village. The locals call it by its Tamil name, Tarangambadi, meaning "song of the waves". The main business is fishing, the majority of the population Hindu, the Moslem men trading still, or working in Europe or the Gulf. It is a community where everyone knows everyone, where brothers feud and where families rise and decline. Or rather, since this is India, it is at least three interlocking Hindu, Moslem and Christian. Living close beside families of all religions, Georgina Harding was able to observe the fine details of their existance, both mundane and spititual. The women's routine, the children's play and the gossip run alongside the business ventures, the funerals and the interventions of devils.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, India

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Georgina Harding is an English author of fiction. Published works include her novels Painter of Silence (shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012), The Spy Game (shortlisted for The Encore Award 2011), and The Solitude of Thomas Cave.

She has also written two works of non-fiction: Tranquebar: A Season in South India and In Another Europe. She lives in London and the Stour Valley, Essex.

Reviews

[Daren · Rating 2 out of 5]

A short book summarizing the stay of the author and her son, at Tranquebar (now Tharangambadi) a fishing village on the Coromandel Coast in Tamil Nadu. The book covers religion, and Christianity in detail (almost a third of the book), the people she interacts with, the history of the village, and the places she visits.
It is an easy read, but it is really not gripping in anyway.

[Alaric Seven · Rating 5 out of 5]

lovely wonderful book, and years later after visit to Kumbakonam we drove out to Tranquebar, and I have always wanted to go back!!! Harding's book taught me so much.