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The sky blazed pink and waves crashed against the boulders lining Kudle Beach along India’s southwest coast. A few metres from the shore, a smiling Indian man in a loose white shirt and an orange dhoti played the baglama, a Turkish string instrument. Accompanying him was a caucasian bare-chested man, sinewy and sunburnt, playing the hang — a Swiss percussion instrument that looked like two dimpled steel vessels glued together. Rounding off the odd quartet were two more bare-chested men: a local making music with a football, and a European with a West-African goblet drum called the djembe. A rapt circle of listeners — mostly western backpackers, with a smattering of Indian tourists — sat around these musicians. Some swayed to the music, others leaned back with their eyes closed.
The next evening, a group of seven men formed a drum line with their djembes. Djembe, in the Bambara language of Mali, means ‘gather in peace’. And as the sun dipped again, this is what the tourists did. One by one, they started to dance and a buzzing, moving circle formed. None of this was organised, a backpacker told me later. “We just come together and play off of each other’s energy. Nothing planned. Just energy.”
As I witnessed this confluence of music, dance, and the setting sun in January last year, I couldn’t believe my luck for stumbling upon this place. The only reason I had ‘settled’ for the somewhat inaccessible Kudle Beach — auto-rickshaws just about fit on the narrow road that connects the beach to the town of Gokarna — was because I couldn’t find a room in the nearby and more popular Om Beach.
For months after I had left, Kudle captured my fascination. What was this place like in the past? How did a community of hippies and backpackers find this little-known beach? I reached out to travellers online who spoke fondly about their time in Kudle, but added that the beach wasn’t without its problems. And while Kudle might have been ‘little known’ even ten years ago, it was now on the cusp of becoming like its much more popular neighbour.
Sleemy, a Swiss man who has regularly visited since 1996, tried to sum up Kudle for me: “It is a little bit like how Goa was 30 years ago.”
^ A quaint little guesthouse in Gokarna is a treat for the hassled mind. | Niyantha Shekar
In the 60s and 70s, Goa became a hotspot on the hippie trail as young men and women from around the world arrived in droves, several of them on the road from Europe. Soon, as Goa grew crowded and commercialised, word slowly spread about the small pilgrim town of Gokarna, situated 150 kilometres away, home to beaches untouched by tourists.
When the first westerners to Kudle, two men who go by the names Ulli Baba and Mally Baba, arrived in the mid 1970s, it was a farming village and beach separated from Gokarna by jungles and hills. Venkatramana Hegde, or simply Hegde as everyone calls him, was the only one in Kudle who spoke a bit of English. He welcomed the foreigners into his home, and over the years built separate rooms in his 30-acre farm as more visitors walked over the hills to lounge in the solitude of Kudle.
“To a naïve young traveller from Europe,” Ulli Baba told me by email, “Kudle appeared like paradise, inhabited by peaceful, friendly, hard-working people who welcomed these strange foreigners, Mally and me, into their small community… For me at the time, this simple way of life, close to nature and the Gods, appeared to be what we could strive for and learn from.”
In the documentary Last Hippie Standing (2001) by Marcus Robbin, journalist Peter D’Souza talks about how the foreigners in 1970s Goa didn’t identify with the locals, preferring the company of fellow hippies instead. In Kudle, however, the early visitors learnt Kannada, the local language, and mingled with the villagers as they would with family.
“They didn't speak any English, so I learnt some Kannada. I made my own dictionary of a few hundred words,” Harry Peronius, a 60-year-old Swedish photographer, told me on Skype. He first visited Kudle in 1986, and has come back to visit several times over the years.
What made him return to Kudle?
“It was not spoiled by the tourists as Goa was at the time. When I returned to Kudle, I was invited to sleep over in the farmers’ houses. Many people knew who I was… This personal friendship was the main reason.”
There was music and dance even in the early days of tourism in Kudle. Unlike the scenes I saw in January, the farmers were the artists. After a hard day’s work on the paddy fields, they would form a drum circle and sing songs that had been passed down for ages, as a man danced at the centre. This tradition faded away in the ’90s as the villagers gave up farming to run guesthouses and cafés along the one-kilometre-long stretch of beach. Once the village was electrified, a road was paved in between the hills, and travel guide publisher Lonely Planet listed it, there was a steady stream of tourists in the ‘season’, from November to March, and with it a steady income as well.
The new money and development also brought a shift in landscape — verdant paddy fields gave way to shacks — and a shift in culture with farmers competing with each other to woo tourists. Farmers turned to alcohol as well, which Harry acknowledged had “become a problem in some families”.
What did the villagers tell him about how tourism that had changed their lives?
“Almost always they answer in a similar way, ‘Certain things were better before, but much is better today,” Harry said. “But, of course, they see that there is a lot of garbage there. There is a culture clash. The lifestyles are different. The development of any society where an old, traditional culture meets a new, western lifestyle creates conflicts.”
The worst of the region’s monsoon season was over when I returned to Kudle in September, but the sky was still overcast, there was drizzle in the air and the beach was ghostly empty. The few shacks still standing were protected from the waves by sand bags and massive rocks. Beer bottles, plastic waste and bits of fishing nets had been washed ashore. Wooden poles that suggested the outline of January’s shacks stuck out of the sand.
The Spanish Place was one of the few permanent structures on the beach. An array of tall coconut trees stood on either side of the guesthouse’s small purple gate. A stream of water ran in front like a moat. Mari Shastri, a 54-year-old mustachioed man wearing a white fedora, a red polo T-shirt, and checked shorts opened the gate and welcomed me in.
^ The police are kind enough to allow people to build guesthouses on the beaches at Goa. | Niyantha Shekar
When he started The Spanish Place in 1991, around 300 tourists visited Kudle in a year. Since 2005, that number, according to Shastri, has swollen to 1,000 tourists per day during the peak season. As Shastri and I talked, a hotel with a swimming pool was under construction a few hundred metres behind his guesthouse.
“Most of the agricultural land is being filled with clay for building rooms,” Shastri admitted. “Groundwater is gone. There is rubbish. Sewage from the toilets. There is no good water. It’s all contaminated. Because there is no plan.”
There have been issues with the police as well. On Valentines Day, 2014, cops from Gokarna busted a party in the forests behind Kudle. They had received a tip-off that around 200 tourists were partying in a reserved area and were using drugs.
In a report filed by Bangalore Mirror on the incident, one tourist claimed, "I saw women being dragged by the arms, pulled by their hair, their faces slapped and their torsos lashed with sticks."
Erica Derrickson, an American tourist I spoke to on Skype, mentioned to me that the police have a checkpoint set up in Gokarna to search foreigners for drugs. “If they find marijuana or anything, even just a rolling paper, they will charge you bakshish [a bribe].”
“Most of the locals complain about the police,” Shastri said. “But it is wrong saying that police are corrupt. They are very kind people in some ways because this is all illegal [running businesses close to the beach shore] and they have allowed us.”
There are regulations that prohibit construction within 500 metres from the high-tide line, but no one enforces them in Kudle. Guesthouses have cropped up in an ad-hoc manner — several so close to the sea that waves splash against their sandbag walls. This presents a difficult situation because, if the rules are enforced, several guesthouse-owners could lose their livelihoods.
In that context, Shastri’s only wish was that the police ask for reasonable bribes.
“That is the only problem with police. Don’t blame them, because otherwise nobody is earning anything.”
The auto-rickshaw I was in lurched off the main road and headed into the jungle. When I had tried to negotiate the fare with the auto-driver, he had refused to budge, saying that the route was terrible. He wasn’t kidding. The auto shuddered wildly, like it was about to tip over, as it headed down a muddy, bumpy path that took us deeper into the woods. And then the road ended. I had to walk the rest of the way.
^ The woods that lead to Kudle beach are long and deep. | Niyantha Shekar
As I trekked slowly down a path that wasn’t clearly marked, I found myself surrounded by dense green foliage. Thorny shrubs scratched at my ankles. I heard what sounded like a monkey jump from a tree above. And then I received confirmation when I saw a family of monkeys further ahead keenly observe me. I figured this was what approaching Kudle from Gokarna must have been like 30-40 years ago. After an unnerving 20 minutes, I breathed a sigh of relief when I came across a few huts in the midst of lush green paddy fields. I followed the sound of waves and arrived at my destination, the tiny Half Moon Beach, christened so because of its shape.
Half Moon is one of five beaches separated by hills in and around Gokarna. The more hills one crosses, the greater the chance of finding solitude. And solitude was what 43-year-old Raghu Upadhyay was searching for when he, disenchanted by the transformation of Kudle, shut down his guesthouse a couple of years ago and moved to a fenced-off plot of land facing Half Moon Beach. Three barking dogs ran out from inside and gathered around me. Upadhyay, a reed-thin man with bushy eyebrows, greying sideburns and a balding head, came out a minute later and silenced them with a shout.
The roaring waves were in my ears as we sat across from each other on plastic chairs in an open area in front of his hut. I worried out loud that it might rain, but he sagely pointed out that the clouds were drifting in a different direction. It was probably the only time in our conversation that he spoke calmly. When I brought up Kudle, his blood boiled. He raged against the builders who he said dug up the hills around Kudle for mud to fill paddy fields and construct indiscriminately.
“There is no septic tank [in Kudle],” he said, disgusted. “At 11 o’clock in the night, you see down in the hotel area there is a pipe through which they let all black shit-water into the sea.”
He was also frustrated by the changing nature of tourists — “They feel like they own everything” — preferring the simple ways of the original hippies, whose only needs were a bed, a blanket, a candle and pot for chai . When tourists now trek the hills and find Half Moon Beach, it riles him up. “I shout, ‘Fuck off! Go away!’ I send the dogs after them,” he said with a mirthless laugh.
His anger was couched in the fact that several tourists left behind a trail of beer bottles and trash. As he dug the soil to plant fruits and flowers, he discovered more and more plastic. So, he collected the litter and handed it to trash collectors from the town of Kumta, 30 kilometres away. He claimed to have found 1,500 beer bottles himself, but found his current situation preferable to his life in Kudle.
^ Construction is underway in the bowels of a natural environment. | Niyantha Shekar
“Till people come here, I’ll enjoy,” he said. “Now there is no road or electricity here. No Wi-Fi. No TV. No newspaper. You have to sacrifice to stay here. There are monkeys, leopards and wild boars. We have to keep our dogs inside in the night. Even my friends from Gokarna are scared to come here. So, I have peace.”
“Mally Baba and Ulli Baba were the first customers on the beach. They are big and long people. It was the first time we saw white people.”
It was my final afternoon in Kudle. I was seated on Hegde’s porch. The 86-year-old man sat quietly to my left on a high-backed wooden chair, and across from me was Shivanand, Hegde’s 46-year-old son who did all the talking. A few minutes earlier, I had walked around their beautiful property where I saw paddy fields looking vibrant in the sun, brightly painted rooms for guests from around the world, and a two-storeyed house at the back with a narrow, mossy pool built by Mally Baba.
The Hegdes earned little from farming, and most of their income came from their guesthouse. But this wasn’t much either since their property was situated inside the village where few tourists venture. Having built the first chai shop on the beachfront, they could have shored up their finances by expanding. It was a template that had worked for several locals. When I spoke to the farmer who owned the guesthouse I was staying in, he mentioned how he had to invest Rs.15 for each brick that had to be transported from Gokarna. He then spruced up the guestrooms with wide, comfortable beds, air-coolers, and even cable TV. But his life was better for it because the alternative, farming, had proven to be a lot of hard work for too little money.
The Hegdes, however, just couldn’t reconcile their personal views on how to live life with the demands of the modern tourist.
“You have to sell the beer! People want the beer!” Shivanand exclaimed. “People drink and enjoy. Where is the peace? I don’t know!”
^ The skies transfers its hues to the waters below. If the earth gave the sky its colour, it might be black. | Niyantha Shekar
Peace came up a lot in our conversation. It was also a word that I had heard several times in my chats with the early tourists. What was it that made Kudle peaceful?
“It’s the nature,” he said. “You can hear the wind, see the moving leaves.”
He then got up, took a couple steps and faced a hotel that was under construction a few hundred metres away.
“No matter, we have peace. Whatever happens… we have peace,” Shivanand said, the conviction faltering in his voice.
Concrete beams outlined the hotel to be in the distance. There were signs of deforestation with portions of surrounding hills cleared for construction.
“What can we do?” he asked, turning to face me.
I didn’t have an answer, and he wasn’t expecting one either. In the distance, we could see workers hacking away at red laterite stones. But we couldn’t hear them. Not yet.
What we heard for the moment was silence, the still sound of nature.
