I enter India, my ancestral home, a stranger and leave a ‘belly-button relative’

At Chittal, a busy roadside cafe en route from the heritage village of Kanadukathan to the bustling markets of Pallathur, I’m waiting for a fresh batch of tendrilled bhajis to fry on a crackling fire outside when I casually enter an existential crisis.

It’s prompted when a friendly staff member strikes up an idle conversation. “How long are you staying for?” he asks in a heavy accent. The question should be innocuous enough – but to a fellow brown-skinned person? Ooof!

Is it that obvious that I’m Indian in heritage only? Doesn’t my appearance suggest someone who’s tried, but hasn’t quite blended in to western culture?

I suspect I’m not the only second-generation immigrant grappling with questions of belonging when visiting the motherland as a tourist. My first trip, to Mumbai in 2009, was a girl-cousins trip, and shopping was the excuse. I flew over excited to see the place from whence the Ganatras came, but it battered all my senses immediately.

The beeps of the tuk-tuks were constant, as was the mortal risk involved when travelling in one. The multisensory pummelling involved in-your-face colours everywhere, constant stares and oppressive humid air.

The kicker was that I was experiencing culture shock with my own supposed culture. I didn’t know if I was too sensitive to the differences, or too westernised, or if India was just not my cup of chai.

It felt like I was the opposite of a “plastic Paddy”, a term I learned soon after moving to Dublin. I saw it in action a couple of weeks in: I vividly remember American tourists in Hogan’s dropping “we Irish” into conversation, as if it were their right from the day they were born in Connecticut. How easily they lay claim to Ireland, I thought a little enviously. How decisively they own their identity.

I wish I could define myself so easily. But how do I parse which parts of me come from my mother country, my family background in Britain, my birth country of Canada, or Ireland – where, with no substantial claim, I felt I found my people? It’s complicated, to put it mildly. There’s friction, and gaps, so I daren’t be so bold as to feel a true sense of belonging anywhere. And that’s always most apparent when I’m a tourist in India. As I return for the fifth time, I wonder if that’s something I’ll just have to live with, like my inherited nose and predisposition for diabetes.

The southeast state of Tamil Nadu is a new destination for me. The state of 80 million people welcomes the second-highest number of domestic tourists in India, thanks largely to its famous colourful ornate temples that make for pleasing pilgrimages. It also includes the embroidery-like tea plantations in the hilly heights of Nilgiri, and the industrial hotbed of Chennai, known as the “Detroit of India” for its soaring automotive industry. Further south, the Bay of Bengal is where nature is at its wildest, with wide stretches of coral-reefed coasts making it worth the trek.

The area of Chettinad, at its centre, is my destination. A loose conglomerate of around 75 villages, it’s the home of the Nattukottai Chettiars: the caste of the money lenders and business owners who made a fortune trading across Southeast Asia and Europe in the heyday of the British empire.

They weren’t shy about it either: during the 19th and first half of the 20th century, the wealthiest families built palatial mansions of pastel-block colours, the finest material from their far-flung travels, and hints of art deco with religious and colonial imagery, which together feel about as expected in these rural plainlands as a brownstone in Brooklyn. About 1,000 of these ancestral homes remain standing across these villages, in various states of repair.

I’m staying in THE Lotus Palace (the capital letters helping to distinguish it from the other Lotus Hotels that exist). It’s a former family mansion built in 1795, which required nearly five years of restoration before reopening as a luxury boutique hotel in 2024.

Painted a creamy light orange and bordered with equally creamy blue, yellow and red, it stands proudly within the village’s main street, along the same stretch as a small temple, an artisan woodcarver and another mansion house opposite, which belonged to the same family and now houses the hotel’s grand streetside cafe, Vaadhyar’s House.

Both buildings offer pristine examples of why the Chettinad mansions have attracted Unesco attention, and become the main attraction in this rural hinterland. The heritage hotel follows the traditional layout to a tee, informed by a balance of the Tamil equivalent of feng shui found in manuals such as the Manaiyadi Sastram, and the practical need to operate as a place of business. The chandelier at the entrance was re-created from black and white photos, using Belgian crystals. It stands before a showstopping ornate door, each frame artfully carved from teak wood over the course of a year. It’s flanked by thinnai – a raised veranda – once where the money lending took place.

Stepping through the door into welcome coolness and quietude, another reception area (the back office of the business) continues into a colonnade-studded inner courtyard, surrounded by two storeys of 15 boldly decorated bedrooms, each fragranced with invitingly fresh jasmine – a common motif in this part of the world.

Of the Chettinad mansions throughout the region, only some are maintained to this original beauty. If they’re not a hotel or tourist attraction, they operate as private properties, like the nearby Chettinad Palace, built by the first Raja of Chettinad in 1912. But most mansions were left to ruin due to emigration, destitution, or plain old family squabbles.

These derelict properties are the opposite of grandeur. Overgrown gardens with weeds reach to the dusty streets, crumbled walls with vegetation push through broken stained glass, and faded colours of religious deities grandly stand at the threshold. But to my eye, the faded glory artfully speaks to Chettinad’s postcolonial history, nature’s prowess and the world’s urbanisation.

For a small sum of 50 rupees (45 cents), I step into a mansion in the village that’s thrown open its doors to visitors. Meenakshi, who lives there as part of eight related families, explains that for their scenario, opening it to visitors was their only choice. “The roof is leaking. We’ve repaired one portion for 2 lakhs (€1,800), and the rest cost 10 lakhs (€9,000),” she says. “Sadly these houses aren’t built for the modern weather system. It never used to rain much here, but we get rain and floods so often now.”

A former medical superintendent in Singapore, Meenakshi is now retired in Kanadukathan and settled into village life, though she’s always considered this home – while abroad, she returned annually for a community-wide reading of the holy scripture of Ramayana. The fortnight-long event took place in the building of THE Lotus Palace, and the hotel continues this ritual to this day: a testament to the traditions that run deep in the village.

I consider Meenakshi’s annual return to her roots as I move on. Perhaps my detachment from India comes from having no close family or connection here – around the 1940s, most Ganatras moved from Gujarat in India to east Africa to help in the British effort to build railroads. They moved again in the 1970s, to the UK, as local resentment built against these immigrants. Colonisers sure have a lot to answer for.

My mixed background at least means I explore THE Lotus Palace and Chettinad with a brush of the familiar. I have a knowledge of the religious customs, and can hazard a guess at the social norms. Some cultural aspects, like parrot fortunetelling – a revered form of divination here – are still full of novelty.

The food is like nothing I’ve tasted before. While Chettinad curries seem to be a trending item in the West, it’s no surprise that it tastes infinitely better at the source. I try it as part of THE Lotus Palace’s 86 Pillars’ raja virundhu, or “feast for the kings”: a 21-item procession of flavours served on a banana leaf – salt and mango pickle first, sweet second, condiments after, then the punchy, fiery depth of the Chettinad curry and rice at the end.

I sightsee with childlike wonder. Kavitha, a local guide brimming with both knowledge and reflections about life in Chettinad, talks me through other prominent mansions, and we learn about Chettinad’s jewellery and tile heritage, and the stunning starch-stiff cotton saris that distinguish Tamil ladies. We amble through the antiques market: a whole area devoted to flea market finds, from pillars extracted from mansion properties, to skilled etched paintings of Hindu deities, to creepy empire-era figurines of British babies. She takes me to lakeside temples such as Sri Kotravaleeswarar Temple, which exudes such a calm that she calls it her “stressbuster”. I can see why. This is the India I resonate with, and it reminds me that India is far from one amorphous mass: each state is country and culture unto itself, and perhaps that adds to the difficulty in feeling a sense of belonging.

As we amble back through its dusty streets, Kavitha shyly asks me about my name. I’m sort of Indian, I tell her, except I’m kind of not. “Ohhh, you’re a belly-button relative!” she says. “I’m so proud when I meet belly-button relatives,” she says. Not quite sure what she means, I add in more nuances and caveats, but she’s more interested in the top line of our shared heritage.

I suspect “belly button relatives” is a colloquial term for the Indian diaspora, like “plastic Paddy” except a term of endearment, judging by her ear-to-ear grin. I leave Chettinad still not entirely sure. But while I attempt to answer the unanswerable, I’ll take it as a definition of our kinship, and indeed, my relationship to India: not plastic, not fake, just tethered. Belly-button relatives we are.

Fact box

Shilpa Ganatra was a guest of THE Lotus Palace Chettinad and THE Park Chennai. Rooms start from about €188 per night plus taxes. Indirect flights from Dublin to Tiruchirappalli Airport start from €536. theparkhotels.com