Just before nine on Friday evening we went down to the corner of East Car Street. Close by there is an old pillared mandapa in a sandy lane lined with tiled houses. This is Mala’s neighbourhood shrine to Ganesh, whom the Tamils call Vinayaka, the jolly elephant-headed god who blesses the start of all enterprises. There are said to be exactly 108 Ganeshes around the temple at Chidambaram – Mala probably knows where they all are too – but this is the one she and her neighbours choose for their prayers before they go on any journey. The bus was parked by the shrine, its bonnet decked with a chain of marigolds, a sign ‘Airbus 630’ stuck inside the window. The driver was fussing over a few lastminute checks. On the dashboard was a little plastic Murugan hung with fresh jasmine, smoke curling up from a fistful of incense sticks. Next to it was a silvered bust of Balaji framed by birds and flowers, and Siva’s silver trident studded with fake red jewels. By the cigarette lighter hung Our Lady of Velankanni, and on the wheel a little sandalwood Ganesh. And if that were not enough, there was a notice prominently painted on the side of the bus: ‘Insured by Overseas Insurance Company Cuddalore’. We were in safe hands.
The bus was already jam-packed. The organizer, Mr Ramasamy, was clucking around like a mother hen, with his passenger list in one hand and a large bag of rupees in the other. He and two friends had hired the bus and driver, and organized the whole thing. Mala, as usual, had their measure: with sixty persons at 200 rupees per person she thought they would make 4000-5000 profit out of the whole venture: ‘4500 bus hire, petrol 5000, driver 150 a day. You see, they will make 5000 rupees.’ She wagged her head. And as it turned out, for the wear and tear on his constitution, I thought Mr Ramasamy was welcome to every paise.
Mr Ramasamy was quite a card. He had a twinkly eye, buck teeth, a big nose, and a shock of greying hair, which always stood on end. He was an infant-school teacher and part-time life assurance salesman. ‘Both these talents are very necessary for conducting a good pilgrimage,’ he assured me. ‘If you are requiring temporary cover I can oblige,’ he grinned. ‘Very reasonable rates.’ Even when waking us up at four the morning he couldn’t resist a joke, and at low points on the journey he would sometimes liven things up by reading out choice quotes from his supply of joke books, the sort of thing you bought on bus-station stalls along with crossword and game books, and movie magazines. He had Good Jokes, Best Jokes, Famous Last Jokes, but his favourite was Aruvai Joks, which, loosely translated, means ‘Lousy Jokes’ of ‘Jokes to Make You Squirm with Embarrassment’. These he would deliver accompanied by loud guffaws, which he would then translate as best he could for the foreigner on the bus. I can’t say I ever became a connoisseur of Tamil humour, but it is gentle, so far as I could tell. Crudity, violence and pornography are eschewed: word play, social jokes and movie jokes are preferred. Sex jokes are fine so long as they are discreet. Most were communicable in any language, mother-in-law jokes, as might be expected, being especially popular among the Tamils. (First man: ‘My mother-in-law is a goddess.’ Second man: ‘You’re lucky, mine’s still alive!’ Mr Ramasamy’s own mother-in-law, by the way, was on board, sitting with his wife two rows back; she took it all with an indulgent smile.)
‘We have saved you the place of honour,’ said Mr Ramasamy with a grandiloquent gesture towards the front bench seat, right behind the driver. It would have been churlish to say so, but it was not the best place on the bus. There was no leg room (I am 6 feet 2 inches tall) and most of the seat was already occupied by an extremely fat man who seemed set upon maintaining a vow of silence all the way to Tiruchendur. The first stage of the journey, Mr Ramasamy announced, was to be nine hours non-stop through the night down to Rameshwaram. There was a great buzz of excitement in the air, the women carefully packing their tiffin boxes and spare saris into the luggage racks, the children all wide awake and thrilled with the prospect of the adventure which lay ahead. At last we moved off slowly down East Car Street, with most people still on their feet. By the temple gate more people got on, so it was now standing room only. Mutinous shouts rose from the back. Mr Ramasamy suddenly looked worried, and clapped his hands to get everyone to stand still for a proper count. Messages were shouted out of the window, and a little further on we stopped once more to take on board a dozen folding chairs to put in the aisles. The aisles were now filled up and everyone had a seat. Everyone that is, except a tall and gangling priest, who remained perched on the engine box. Raja was a Dikshithar from the temple; he had come with his friend Ganesh, another priest. Though off duty, both of them were resplendent in their Friday best: white loincloth, Brahmin’s thread, bodies meticulously striped with holy ash, and hair done up in the traditional topknot. Suddenly, with one hand on the overhead rack, Raja vaulted with surprising athleticism over the aisle seats and launched himself on top of me. Ours was a seat for three people, not two, he pointed out. Could the fat man and I kindly make room? Clearly, five days of this was not going to be the most comfortable ride of my life. Still, we were off on pilgrimage, and for everyone else on the bus bodily comfort was the last thing on the mind. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.
Behind me, sitting with the ladies, their saris glowing in the red night light, Mala grinned at me and wagged her head. ‘You’ll get used to it in no time,’ said Mr Ramasamy as I tried to massage my dead leg. ‘This is a very good bus, the latest model, super de luxe,’ he said showing off the threadbare furnishings and metal seats; ‘very comfortable, no expenses spared.’ He rolled his eyes and guffawed. ‘By the time we reach Tanjore you won’t feel a thing.’
We set off soon after nine o’clock, careering through the town with our horn blaring. We swept past the bus station and the Nataraja Talkies, swerving on the wrong side of the road round the Gandhi statue, and scattering unwary clientele at the almond milk stall. There were sixty-six of us in a fifty-six-seater bus. On top of that the driver had two assistants. One of them, a doe-eyed youth, seemed to be there simply to keep him awake. The other was the mechanic, and his main job was to keep the video working. He was to spend the next two hours fighting a losing battle with the picture, which kept disintegrating into a blizzard of white static and unbearable noise. Meanwhile tantalizing glimpses of a cool southern night flitted past in our headlights as we headed into the countryside.
The video bus is a new and popular form of pilgrimage in southern India. You have the spiritual benefit of visiting the sacred places and in between you see your favourite old movies. Unfortunately, in my place of honour, the screen and its speakers were about twelve inches above my head. It was a kind of torture. They stopped twice to try to fix the picture even before we left town, then again on the way to Sirkali and once more after Kumbakonam, obstinately trying to get a steady image. They then gave up until we had a brief night tea stop somewhere after Tanjore, when they finally got it working.
From 1 a.m. the old MGR movies rolled out. MGR had been the chief minister of Tamil Nadu from 1977 until his death in December 1988, and his face was still everywhere in the state. On political posters, pilgrim stalls and roadside shrines his furry white pillbox hat and dark glasses are as recognizable here as Churchill’s trilby and cigar were once in England. This was a man whom a senior British diplomat once described to me as ‘the most improbable politician I ever met’. But that hadn’t stopped MGR gaining almost god-like status in the south. Among the poor he was credited with virtually miraculous powers. The story of his return from long hospital treatment in the US was famous. MGR had been gone for a year, during which the Tamil land had endured a severe drought. There had even been special pujas for rain held in the big temples, but to no avail. But within hours of his stepping off the plane at Meenambakkam, the skies just opened and every tank in the state was filled to overflowing. MGR evidently employed a good soothsayer (or a good meteorologist – one of the two). There were at least thirty suicides upon the news of his fatal illness, in the manner of religious suicide in the old days. More than two million attended his funeral on Madras marina, the site of which is now a place of pilgrimage.
Born of a poor Tamil family, MGR had been a movie star through the fifties and sixties, corny old song and dance movies, dramas of mistaken identity, lost twin brothers, wicked stepmothers, poor boys who had made good; movies full of dramatic clashes, pantomime emotion and fat-bottomed dances, all spiced with leering, coy cuddles with young starlets (one of whom was now MGR’s successor as chief minister). During those early years he had been a member of the DMK, the Tamil regional party which stood for Tamil autonomy, atheism and anti-Brahminism, and his films had pushed a sentimental, watered-down version of the DMK ideology, using the party’s symbols and colours on the screen. Justice for the poor, freedom in love for women, defeat for the corrupt, the triumph of the lower castes over the Brahmins – it was all there. Of course this was far from the reality of life for the poor labouring classes from whom MGR drew his fans, and subsequently his political support. But that was the point. His films acted out the fantasies of the ordinary people.
Cinema was – and still is – the great form of mass entertainment in the south, and films were the chief vehicle for the political message. Films can turn actors into chief ministers and stars into gods. Even if at the time MGR had no political ambitions (or, come to think of it, divine ones too) he had certainly tailored his image very carefully during his early movie career: unscrupulously, some would say. By the time he was forced to leave the DMK and form his own party, in 1972, his make-believe world had permeated Tamil popular culture. His eleven-year rule from 1977 to 1987, said a recent Indian study of the great man’s career, ‘was one of the darkest periods in the modern history of the state’. Under his aegis, his critics allege, profiteers, liquor barons, real-estate speculators and party magnates made fortunes, while living standards sank among the rural poor, the mainstay of his support. But, like a familiar and much-loved deity, MGR never lost the affection of the Tamil masses and consequently never had to answer the claims of conventional political morality. In the end he remained, an ageing and sick giant, inscrutable behind his dark glasses, surrounded by his soothsayers and courtiers, still disbursing his patronage while the cases piled up by the thousand in the offices of the Madras Corporation, which he had abolished. It was an almost incredible tale, which still rendered many of my friends in Madras speechless with pain and perplexity. When pressed, though, all of them admitted that if MGR had anything, it was charm: from the lowest to the highest, he captivated anyone who met him. ‘He made them happy, even though the truth was the very opposite of what it appeared.’
Sitting next to me, and still somehow immaculate, Raja had two theories as to why MGR was so loved by the people: ‘First, social themes. He cared for the poor, they called him their father, their brother, their son. They think he loved them. Second, is the way he acted. Watch this fight now.’ I looked up to see what appeared to me to be a rather overweight and ungainly man in advanced middle age send two strapping banditti flying in somersaults across the set. ‘Watch his movement,’ Raja continued. ‘You see? Very good, very strong, no one could beat him. Now here watch the way he dances too; Tamil people love the way MGR dances. Women especially. Many women admired MGR. Including the present chief minister.’ Unbelievable, it all seemed to me. But there it was. Raja watched in approving silence for a while and then gestured once more at the screen: ‘A very clever man. Mr MGR was getting four rupees for every bottle of beer sold in Tamil Nadu.’ Even in a state where alcohol is frowned on by all religious people, and where partial prohibition was in force until recently, this added up to some kickback.
In the early hours, after two MGR films, they put on the new star Ragini Kanth. Modern stuff full of macho posturing and fighting. ‘This man was a bus conductor before he became a star in films,’ said Raja, who was turning out to be no slouch as a film buff, to add to his skills in Vedic slokas. ‘Actually it was the no. 17 bus in Bangalore. When he became famous he gave a great party for all the conductors and drivers on his old route.’ Ragini Kanth’s film was much more up to date in its pace and cutting, though still brimming with exaggerated fight sequences and dance numbers. ‘He is a good man. Like a child,’ said Raja. ‘We like his sense of humour. He is one of us.’ And indeed, Ragini Kanth’s was an engaging screen presence. One could not help but laugh with him as he let his audience in on his jokes. Ganesh chipped in from his chair in the aisle: ‘Watch this now. He has very good tricks.’ Having wiped the floor with the villain, Ragini Kanth flipped his cigarette up into his mouth, quiffed his hair with his hand and gave a top-sided, quizzical smile to the camera. ‘He is one of us, our brother,’ Ganesh went on. ‘He has fan clubs all over Tamil Nadu; social clubs which support him and do good works. I also belong.’ So the Tamil movie star fan clubs even found their stalwarts amongst the world’s oldest and most exclusive clan of ritual specialists. To Ganesh (should it even occur to him to wonder), there would be nothing strange in that at all.
The bus charged on through the night. On my right-hand side the fat man kept falling asleep and pushing me against Raja and both of us off the edge of the seat. I gave up trying to sleep and looked around me. We were a mixed bunch: more women than men, some children, Brahmin priests sitting with lower castes, a tax inspector, a schoolteacher, shopkeepers and housewives, a hotel worker. Across the aisle, there was a little girl called Minakshi. She was four years old, with a big smile and huge round dark eyes (like her namesake, the goddess of Madurai). She had come on the pilgrimage with her aunt and her grandmother, who were both very kind to this stranger. Though we had few words between us, they always offered to share their food with me, and better still, to share their feelings. Minakshi’s mother had died in childbirth, and she had been brought up by her mother’s sister, a rather shy, attractive woman who did not yet have children of her own. Minakshi always amazed me by her patience and good humour during the long hours on the bus. She had no seat of her own, and would sit and sleep on her aunt’s knee, or on the wheel box with the driver’s mate, on Raja’s lap, or even my own, in front of the TV screen. Like most Indian children she had the knack of sleeping uncomplaining anywhere – unlike me, I was ashamed to acknowledge.
And so as the night progressed we all settled down with each other. Behind me, lit by the glow of the video screen, the women in their saris were slumped against each other, the Dikshithars with their elegant hairdos nodding with every bump of the bus. There was no room to fall over; we were so tightly packed that our sleeping heads rested on our neighbours’ shoulders. In the morning Raja’s stripes of ash had left a faint rime on my cheek. No one seemed to need any space, comfort or privacy: only I did, so un-Indian in my desire to find a comfortable position, and a tiny bit of private space. In the end I gave in and ceased to resist as the sleeping fat man slowly lurched over once more and pressed me in fleshy intimacy.
*
At six we stopped on a long straight stretch of country road. To the left the sky was streaked with pale mauve behind distant streamers of white cloud. Bleary and stiff, we all piled out, the women off into the bush at the back of the bus, the men to the front. I gulped the fresh breeze. We were near the sea.
As the dawn rose, the driver switched off the video and put on a sound tape – popular religious songs now, contemporary versions of ancient hymns which were as familiar to the people on the bus as MGR’s movie songs. These were the hymns of the Tamil saints, the wandering singers who travelled the length and breadth of the south between the sixth and the tenth centuries, composing their poems about the Tamil holy places, drunk on the colours and fecundity of the Tamil landscape and the immanent presence of the divine. Their songs are played with a racy beat and jangling guitars now, but still to the immortal tunes which have been handed down for so many centuries: ‘O simple heart, if you seek a good end, go to holy Rameshwaram: find salvation at the temple built with love by the beautiful Ram… simple heart go to holy Rameshwaram’. There are usually no end rhymes in Tamil poetry; it is the elegance of the rhythms and the refinement of the phrasing which Tamils love. Not every word is understandable today, but most are, and most Tamil people will know some of the saints’ hymns off by heart: indeed it is still common to meet people who know the entire collection of the saints’ hymns, the Tevaram. It is, let us say, as if English poetry of the age of Beowulf were still popular fare, and the Hymn of Caedmon as familiar to us now as ‘Jerusalem’.
Soon we were running along the coast with the sea on the right-hand side. We passed fishing villages as the light came up: reed houses on wicker platforms, the sea around them like white glass with a gentle swell. Across the straits towards Sri Lanka the night boats were bringing in their catch, their stern lamps still glowing. We came to the bridges across to Rameshwaram island: the railway bridge built by the British in 1914 as a strategic link in their Far Eastern empire; the road bridge opened as recently as 1988 by Rajiv Gandhi and named after his mother Indira. Until then pilgrims had come over by ferry as they had done for thousands of years. On the other side is a landscape of sandy scrub, dunes, acacia palms and umbrella trees, dotted with more thatched fishing villages and the picturesque ruins of old temples and choultries, their colonnades half buried in wind-blown sand. We stopped at the municipal bus park where the sellers of pilgrim knick-knacks were already setting out their stalls and the chai wallahs boiling up their first kettle of the day. We had arrived at one of the four holy cities of India, the southern point of the continent’s sacred geography, ‘Holy Rameshwaram, the temple built on the island by Rama when he bridged the surging ocean’.
On the map the island is shaped like a flying bird, nearly twenty miles down its length, its tail stretching out towards Sri Lanka to which it is almost joined by a string of islands known as Adam’s Bridge – a two-hour crossing by steamer in the old days. The border had been closed now for some time because of the struggles with the Tamil Tigers, in which India had taken the side of the Sri Lankan government against the separatist guerrillas from the Tamil-speaking north of the island – an alliance for which Rajiv Gandhi had paid with his life. Now the straits were crossed by a new kind of smuggler, bringing arms from camps in the mainland, which at that time were covertly tolerated by the DMK government. For a period after Rajiv’s death the disorder even threatened to spread to the Tamil mainland. But all this was far from our thoughts that luminous morning.
The temple stands on rising ground above a freshwater lake on the northern side of the island, a couple of hundred yards from the seashore. It is one of the great holy sites of India. According to the legend (and in India the truthfulness of legendary history has always been valued more highly than mere historical fact), Rama built the first temple here in expiation of his killing of the demon king Ravana in his invasion of Sri Lanka. The tale comes from the Indian epic, the Ramayana, which was probably composed in the first or second century BC but which, like the Homeric poems, refers back to much earlier historical events. As soon became apparent to me on the bus journey, the Ramayana is a tale which pervades the cultural life of India, just as Homer permeated classical culture for so long in the Mediterranean world. But the Ramayana is more than that, for its stories are common currency from the highest to the lowest in the land. It is probably no exaggeration to say that everyone in India is aware of the tale in some way or other, whether Hindu, Christian, or Muslim; it had a staggering success on TV, where it achieved the biggest ratings ever by any TV programme in the world. Whether in the hands of TV, movies, folk theatre or the traditional village storyteller, it still provides a model for human actions, right and wrong, good and evil. ‘It is applicable for all times and all conditions of life,’ said Mr Subrahmaniam, one of the pilgrims, as we walked across to the town bus stop. ‘Everyone of whatever outlook, caste or education knows the Ramayana and loves wholeheartedly the hero and heroine, Rama and Sita; he is the quintessence of the noble and manly spirit, she the very image of the pure and loyal partner for life.’
Rameshwaram is a central place in this famous tale, for here Rama, the beloved incarnation of Vishnu, worshipped Siva after his destruction of the demon Ravana and his winning back of Sita. Here the great strands of Hinduism come together, and so the temple is revered throughout the subcontinent. All Hindus will try to come here once in their lifetime.
The town bus dropped us at the South Gate towards seven. Near by, Muslim custodians in white skullcaps were unlocking a little shrine – ‘The Tomb of Cain and Abel’, I was surprised to learn. The sun was already hot. ‘First we bathe in the sea,’ said Mala, striding off purposefully to the pilgrim stalls opposite, clutching her tiffin box and spare sari. Before any puja, or act of worship, there are preparations to be done: ‘You never approach God empty-handed.’ After checking the prices, she bought coconut, bananas, camphor, vilva leaves and a little boat of sewn leaves to make a puja lamp. Then everyone raced off to the beach in high spirits. The men stripped to their shorts or underpants to splash into the surf, the women went in full sari. After nine hours jammed in the bus being feasted on by mosquitoes, the swim was sheer bliss.
While I dried off, Mala plunged in, letting the waves cover her. Then she stood dripping on the beach, struggling to light her camphor as the breeze kept blowing out her matches. Finally she succeeded and said a little prayer as the little lamp boat went bobbing off across the waves towards Sri Lanka. I sat by her belongings while she went to change with the other women. Just around the bay to the right was a big fishing village with hundreds of boats, a jumble of masts and rigging, with heaps of nets and fish debris on the quay; an occasional pungent whiff came on the breeze. Out in the pearly haze we could see the shadow of the island on the horizon. Then it was time to go to the temple for darshan.
‘Absolutely not permitted,’ said the man on the gate, gesturing to me and then pointing to a painted placard: ‘Only Hindus allowed beyond this point.’ Mala was exasperated and told him off, but he would not budge. If I wanted to pursue the matter I should take it up with the committee. I was directed to the temple office where I waited like a petitioner. ‘Not possible,’ said a minion, wagging his head. Just then the head of the temple committee arrived in his office in a neatly ironed safari jacket and bearing a stainless-steel lunch-box.
‘You are Hindu?’ he asked.
‘No.’ I explained I was on pilgrimage with Tamil friends.
‘But why?’
I tried the most unlikely explanation: ‘It was my horoscope, you see: I was instructed to come by the astrologer at the Nataraja temple.’
He scratched his head. This was unusual. ‘Come in, come in. Sit down.’ He asked the boy to bring tea. Did I have reverence for Lord Siva?
‘Certainly.’
‘You see, usually we do not allow non-Hindus in at all. This is not a strict religious requirement in the scriptures. Indeed many Indian Muslims and Christians come here to worship freely. But problem is, we have many foreigners here; bus parties of French people and Italians in Bermuda shorts with cameras round their necks. If we let them all in they would impinge on the atmosphere for the real devotees who have come here from the farthest reaches of India.’
‘I fully understand. But I would be most obliged, if you would be so kind…’
He relented. He launched into a potted version of the story of Rama’s expedition to Sri Lanka. Then came fatherly talk on matters spiritual.
‘The essential thing when you go in is to be pure-spirited. This is one of the holiest places in India. Inside is a most intense and emotional experience. Take this advice with you. Find a quiet corner. Get a few minutes to meditate in peace and calm. Then you will see some benefit of coming here.’ He called for a dish of brightest vermilion and with his thumb daubed it emphatically on my forehead.
‘There. Now you are pukka. I will write you a note for the people on the gate.’
Inside was absolute mayhem. Huge loudspeakers relayed religious music at nerve-jangling volume. Crowds surged backwards and forwards to a racket of bells, singing and shouting. Round every corner was a sudden rush and thunder of drums. And there was water everywhere. A constant stream of dripping devotees hastened in straight from the sea, many of them bearing pots of Ganges water, the traditional gift here, to be poured over the linga. Inside the shrine there are twenty-two sacred stations, many of them wells representing the rivers of India, and here the pilgrims, especially the young men, raucously pour buckets of water over each other. Around the main shrine was a rugby scrum. Wet from head to toe I headed for the outer corridors to try to locate the commissioner’s quiet corner.
The temple forms a huge rectangle; its most famous feature is a double circuit of corridors round the inner shrines, dramatic colonnades more than 4000 feet long of thirty-foot-high monolithic black granite pillars. The oldest parts of the interior now standing are twelfth-century, made of dark, hard limestone cut in Sri Lanka. But the shrine is evidently much older than its surviving structures. It was already famous in the Mahabharata, whose traditions, like those of the Ramayana, go back to the first millennium BC. Ever since then the island has been one of the great pilgrimage sites, and the official guidebook carries pages of visitors’ comments from Valmiki to Mark Twain, and from Marco Polo to Mahatma Gandhi. Encrusted with carvings, inscriptions and statues, the inner halls are a kind of religious memory store for India; their shelves, niches, shrines, alcoves, and wells form a kind of liturgical theme park for all India’s shrines, a repository of pan-Indian traditions. In the treasury, engraved copper plates describe medieval kings weighing themselves in gold here at the ‘beautiful tirtha of Sri Rama, where the monkey tribes built a bridge across the sea’. Among the bronzes is a lively portrayal of the faithful monkey god Hanuman, garlanded with beads around his head, who gingerly carries a large cylindrical linga like a gunner with a six-inch shell. Mr Ramasamy explained: ‘The main idol is supposed to be the linga brought back by Hanuman himself from Mount Kailash more than three thousand years ago. You see, after Rama overcame Ravana he wanted to worship but there was no linga available. So Hanuman went all the way up to the Himalayas to bring one back. But Hanuman was unavoidably delayed, and Rama made another one out of sand. When Hanuman came back, he was greatly upset to find his efforts had been in vain. So Lord Rama installed Hanuman’s linga also and gave it precedence. ‘This is the very linga,’ said Mr R pointing to a tiny black stone set in a round base and embossed with silver Saivite bands; he spoke with absolute conviction of the presence of the numinous. ‘This we always worship first, in memory of Hanuman.’
Defeated in my attempt to find a quiet corner as the commissioner had recommended, I beat a retreat to a dosa stall for breakfast, shopped for a souvenir (a little framed picture of Rama and Hanuman), and then headed back to the bus for the next leg, the journey to Tiruchendur. Mr Ramasamy clambered over the folding chairs to count us all, and at about ten we pulled out of the coach park, music blaring, damp saris streaming out of the windows. Mala grinned; little Minakshi was wide-eyed with the fun of it all, while her aunt smiled as she combed the wet knots out of her long black hair, looking – to borrow a phrase – the embodiment of healthy and auspicious female power. And indeed we were all starting to let our hair down.
Pilgrimage has always been a vital part of Indian culture. In the Mahabharata there is a list of nearly three hundred holy places which forms a clockwise pilgrimage round India from the Himalayas to Comorin. Some of the key sites, like Lake Pushkar, go back to the Stone Age. Indian people have been travelling to worship at sacred places on rivers, mountains and seashores since before history. Very likely, the wanderings of holy men and women contributed as much as anything to the sense of the cultural oneness of India, which long preceded her political unity. Today pilgrimage is a massive industry, which has been totally transformed by cheap transport and mass communications. At the last Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, fifteen million people were present on the main night of a month-long festival. I can remember being at the home of a Tamil-speaking guide there when poor pilgrims from the deep south arrived from the station; without a word of Hindi, shivering in thin tropical clothes, they had had no idea India was so big, or the north so cold, but they had been drawn there to join in the greatest of all Indian pilgrimages.
The transformation has happened in little more than a century. When investment in railways was first mooted by the board of the East India Company in the late 1840s, there were those who doubted the viability of railways in India, because it was felt that the rules of caste purity and pollution would deter most people from using trains for fear of rubbing shoulders with the wrong caste. In fact, of course, those rules are infinitely changeable and adaptable (the system would hardly have lasted 3000 years if they were not). Knowing which side their bread was buttered on, Brahmin priests everywhere quickly agreed that travel by train did not mean losing the merits of pilgrimage. (No doubt in time they will also agree, if they have not already, to interactive puja disks and conference-call darshans!)
By the early 1900s, thousands flocked to places previously visited by hundreds in the days before railways. Now, in its turn, the bus has taken over, and with the increased popularity of gods like Murugan there has been a tenfold growth in pilgrimage in the south since Independence; indeed bus travel has turned a once obscure and inaccessible place, Subarimalai, into the biggest annual pilgrimage in the world, outstripping even Mecca.
‘Of course times have changed,’ said Mr Subrahmaniam, reflecting on this as we headed away from Rameshwaram: ‘We do the darshan bus tour for speed and convenience. It is not arduous. Only we are fasting for the duration. This is all. In the old days these journeys were made on foot with only the barest necessities. This procured more merit than taking vehicular transport. But for us, time is not as before. Our fathers had more time. We have to be back to work Tuesday morning punctual.’
The journey to Tiruchendur took us another eight hours in fierce heat along rough country roads through a baking wilderness of scrub jungle, crumbling red soil and thirsty palms. By noon the bottled water tasted as if it had just been boiled. In the afternoon the bus broke down in the middle of nowhere and the driver had to take the engine to bits while the women trooped off to do their toilet in the bush. Mala nervously paced up and down on the road as time ticked away: though she does not possess a watch she always knows what time it is, and she knew we were now likely to miss the key puja, the one Sivakami had told her to go to in her dream. Eventually we got going once more, and at last, towards five, we saw the gopura of the temple towering above the seashore.
Tiruchendur means ‘beautiful holy town’ in Tamil, and it is; a seaside town in a very picturesque position, cooled by the sea breezes from Ceylon, a holiday place for fresh air and fun. That Saturday it was bursting at the seams. In the sandy main street of the town we ran into a tide of people like a crowd emptying from a football stadium. To get to the temple from the town you have to walk up a long covered colonnade which stretches for nearly half a mile through the houses and up to the sacred precinct on the seashore: a processional way lined with stalls selling food, tea, flowers, incense, kun kum, astrological readings, children’s toys, cheap clothes and pilgrims’ souvenirs. We struggled up this walkway pushing against the flow of the thousands who were already leaving, and it was past six before we reached our goal. We had just missed the climactic puja of the festival. We pressed on, and suddenly the walkway opened out to reveal vast halls and thousands of people. To a thunderous crescendo of drums and trumpets a troop of elephants caparisoned in gold came sweeping past, followed by glittering palanquins festooned with bunting. We crested. the last rise to the seashore and, choosing our moment, ran across the procession, ducking under the crash barriers and through the police lines. Ahead was the sea; as the light faded a truly fantastic scene was unfolding.
Stretching away to the southern horizon there were thousands camped on the beach, many taking a dip in the sea as the sun set – a million and a half people according to the police inspector standing by the Lost Persons’ Tent. Beyond them was the deep blue sea, fringed by a line of crashing breakers. On the sand, the pilgrims had lit fires, whose smoke eddied round the beach and swirled up into the sky; the wind was now whipping up long streamers of sari cloths hung out to dry: gold, purple, emerald green, marigold, blood red, snapping in the breeze like the flags of some vast medieval encampment. To the east the sky was already darkened, with colossal thunderclouds piled on top of each other over the Palk Strait and the Arabian Sea. Along the horizon was a strip of pale golden light where the sun had gone. In front of us, the main gate of the temple reared up a hundred and fifty feet above our heads, covered in sculpture from top to bottom. Unlike most temples in the south, Tiruchendur’s stonework is unpainted; scoured and bleached by wind and sun, it glowed an unearthly white against the ink-blue sky. On top, in neon lights, was the leaf-shaped lance of Murugan and the sacred syllable OM. (‘It is visible from my bungalow in Tuticorin – seventeen miles away,’ said a pilgrim who suddenly appeared at my elbow as if to read my thoughts.)
Below the tower the columned halls of the temple were hung with coloured electric light-bulbs. We went in, to be enveloped by the roar of the crowds. In the front hall on a raised platform a trio of plump Brahmin priests were doling out holy ash to crowds of worshippers and collecting their rupees as fast as they could, sweating profusely. Beyond them we could see deep into the temple where huge queues pressed behind metal barriers snaked off into the darkness, waiting for their brief audience with the god. Because of our bus breaking down we had missed the last puja, and the queues were so great that there hardly seemed time now to wait in line for darshan, that is, just to see Murugan for a few seconds. We had to be back on the bus down in the town at eight for the five-hour journey to our overnight stop at Cape Comorin. I was turning out to be not quite so committed a pilgrim as I had hoped. I was all for calling it a day. Tea and tiffin on the beach suddenly seemed greatly preferable to plunging into the barely suppressed riot which seemed to be going on inside. There might even be time for a swim. Lord Murugan forgive me, I thought; there’ll be another time. Mala paced to and fro, disappointed at my lack of resolution though too polite to say so. Then I heard another voice at my shoulder: ‘Kind sir, what is your native land?’
‘England.’
‘In all this great congregation of people, I have observed that you are the only foreigner here. Kindly tell me why you have come.’
He was a sweet-faced older man with grey hair, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, a white dhoti and barefoot. Next to him was a young priest wearing a white loincloth, grey ash daubed on his forehead and his upper arms! The old man ran a packaging company in Tuticorin. In the present difficult economic climate the company had fallen on hard times. He had come today to ask the Lord for help. We talked for a while. I explained that we were late and had missed the puja. We said our goodbyes. Ten minutes later he returned with a second priest.
‘You would like to have darshan of the Lord?’
Mala’s face lit up. ‘We would.’
‘Kindly come with me, but first sir I must ask you to take off your shirt. Male worshippers must go before the Lord uncovered.’
A magic wand had been waved. It turned out the priest worked with the old man in Tuticorin. They had spoken to someone on the temple committee. We were taken to the back of the columned entrance hall to a side door through a high granite wall. The door was besieged by crowds, which were kept at bay by the police with an intimidating display of lathi waving. But after an anxious moment’s push and shove, we were pulled through. We found ourselves in a cavernous corridor with immense carved pillars towering in the gloom, pillars capped by monstrous heads – griffins and basilisks glaring, snarling and biting their own tails. They led us down the hall, under more metal barriers, and through another door to join the pilgrims at the head of the queue outside the holy of holies. At the entrance the Chief of Police waved us on with a wag of his head, a friendly beam and a wiggle of his luxuriant handlebar moustache. ‘Welcome!’ he said. ‘Come and see the Lord.’
We stepped on to a raised walkway of wooden duckboards and joined the crowd. First we came to the bronze processional image of Murugan, almost buried in flowers. Then the main stone image of the temple – god as ascetic, renouncer of the transitory and illusory. In his six abodes he has different aspects – Perennial Child, Eternal Youth, Warrior, Husband, Renouncer, Lord of the Tamil Hills – but in all he is benign and life-giving, Apollonian, ‘grace-breathing’, as Robert Browning puts it so memorably in his version of Aeschylus. His wars represent the triumph of good over evil; he destroys wickedness, decay and death. And his smile – the smile of Murugan – is the light of life and eternal youth. For two thousand years that smile has been a theme of Tamil poetry: ‘radiating light, removing darkness from the world’. Finally we were right in front of him. They never fail, do they, these archetypal images? In the modern West we pay analysts to help us tease out some fragmented meaning from such dreams and urges, fulfilled and unfulfilled. Here it is all still out-in the open. Child, goddess, androgyne, killer of the unborn child, whatever you fear or desire you can access directly in cult. The Greeks intuited their imaginal universe in the same way, in their gory myths of father castration and child cannibalism as much as in their mystic tales of renewal in the legends of Demeter and Aphrodite. Here in the presence of an equally rich and ancient body of myth, you can still understand what such stories mean.
‘This is the God of Tamils,’ said the man in front of me as he strained to see the inscrutable face. Then suddenly, as if he had locked on to a beam coming from the eyes of the image, his face was rapt and still amid all the hubbub. He raised his praying hands above his head and spoke some words from an ancient hymn on Murugan: ‘Burning anger is wiped away. Scorched with the spark from your radiant smile, O leader of men with the leaf-shaped spear, lover of Valli the wild huntress.’ He wiped a tear from his eye and turned to me. ‘He is King of the Smile.’
All around us the energy and emotion was almost explosive, but all of it good-natured. The noise of the crowd filled the ears. On either side of the statue the priests were doling out holy ash into outstretched hands as fast as they could; devotees feverishly mouthed prayers. Pointing out the other statues, Mala tried to explain the main details of the myth – Murugan’s wives, his conquest of the demonic forces, which took place on this spot – at the same time urging me to pray, while also hanging on in front of the image to snatch every last second of direct contact with Murugan’s face – and especially his eyes – before the pressure of the crowd swept her on. In this narrow, dark, hot place the press of the crowd might have been frightening, except that the sense of excitement was quite overwhelming: the dim light, the puja flames, the damp heat, the thick, sweet smell of incense and ghee, the drenching scent of jasmine and marigolds, the sweat of our own half-naked bodies – it all combined in an intoxicating, almost sexual effect.
When we left the inner sanctum, the old man and his priest friend led us to another part of the temple, in one of the outer corridors, where there is an ancient Vishnu shrine in an underground chamber cut into the rock of the seashore. The image of the god sleeping on the coils of the undying serpent had been much re-carved and retouched but was evidently much older than the mainly seventeenth-century temple buildings (Pallava, according to our friend; that is, eighth century). The existence of a shrine here is known from the oldest surviving Tamil poetry, from two thousand years ago, in which the deity appears as ‘The Red One’, ‘The Spear Bearer’, or ‘The Bringer of Desire’, as well as in the form of Murugan (‘the young, tender one, the youth’). But the Tiruchendur region has yielded still earlier evidence of such a cult in the south: in the 1890s a settlement was excavated on the Tambraparni river which dated from before 1000 BC. Its people were found to have worshipped a male deity whose emblems were the spear and the cock. Intriguingly, the devotees also seem to have worn mouth locks, just as worshippers of Murugan still do, especially at the hill shrine of Palani. So it may well be that the cult of Murugan and his peacock, lord of the hills and mountains, goes back here deep into prehistory.
The six-day festival at Tiruchendur which climaxes on this day is unique in India in its fastidious adherence to the most ancient Vedic practice. The key event in the ritual takes place in a small room deep inside the temple where the priest burns a hundred and eight different herbs and magical substances – all to avert malaise in the heart and malaise in the cosmos at large, a symbolic renewal of the earth as it were, at the time of year when the monsoon is about to replenish the land. This ritual is accompanied by some of the oldest mantras in Sanskrit, which some scholars now believe to be even older than human speech, mantras whose nearest analogue we now discover is not human speech at all, but birdsong. (Here we may have a clue to the origins of language itself. For if ritual predates language – as it surely must do, since ritual behaviour is known in the animal kingdom – and if mantras are indeed also older than language, then was the first language developed by Homo sapiens for ritual purposes? Curiously enough, this has long been the assertion of the Brahminical tradition in India.)
As a last kindness the old man now led us to the room where the chief priest was receiving guests. We were ushered in to have his blessing. A tiny man with a gentle smile, he was unshaven and looked worn out, not surprisingly, as he had just completed an arduous six-day ritual cycle in which the slightest mistake in syllable or gesture could cast a shadow over the whole of the proceedings. He had a few words with Mala, who could scarcely contain her excitement at the turn of events, and then he gave us special prasad, vilva leaves and holy ash, along with little wrapped packages from the great fire sacrifice. Last of all we were handed fresh vetilay leaves to chew. I hesitated, but Mala insisted, so I put them in my mouth. Their taste was very sharp and bitter and served as it were to wake us after such an otherworldly experience, reviving us as if from a dream.
It was almost time to go. We parted from our guide with effusive thanks. The old man sweetly asked simply that we pray for him and his business. Afterwards we crouched for a while in a quiet corner of the labyrinth around the shrine, our ears still echoing with the noise of the crowds and the distant sound of trumpet and drums. We looked at each other, ash and sweat running down into our eyes. Mala burst out laughing. From somewhere in the depth of the temple, a sudden gust of incense and ghee came on the wind, hot and voluptuous. Her face shone with excitement. ‘We have been very lucky. The future is looking very bright. Many problems will go away.’ For her, it all fitted together – the astrologer’s prediction, my letter, her dream, my coming, the bus breaking down, the old man – everything had led to this auspicious end. Later, when we were back on the, bus, she told the story to her lady friends. As it turned out, most people had managed to get a glimpse of Murugan and everyone was in high spirits. For the next few hours the discomfort of the bus was of no consequence. Even the MGR movie seemed, well, quite good.
It was after midnight before we reached Cape Comorin. With tired feet we trooped down smoky, dank streets lit by dim little pools of light, the cool sea breeze brushing our cheeks. Mr Ramasamy had not booked anywhere in advance, but in India, even at this hour, finding accommodation for a mere sixty-nine people is usually an easy matter. In the Amurath Pilgrims’ Guest House we laid our pieces of cloth on the stone floor of a communal dormitory, and took turns to splash ourselves with buckets drawn from the hostel tank. Before lights out, Mr Ramasamy picked his way over our prone bodies with orders for tomorrow. A last joke. (Mother-in-law: ‘That was a really funny book you gave me. I nearly died laughing.’ Daughter-in-law: ‘I’m so glad to hear it: why don’t you try reading it again?’) We had three hours until reveille. Tomorrow Cape Comorin and the goddess who resides on the southernmost tip of India. Then nine hours’ drive to the sacred waterfalls at Courtallam. Mala grinned at me across the room and gently nodded her head in amusement. We all slept happy.
Before dawn, in that uncertain time between sleep and waking, I became aware of cool raindrops splashing my face, blown on a fresh breeze through an empty window. I reached out my hand. By my side the floor was wet. Outside there were flashes of lightning and rolling thunder. The monsoon had come. At 4.30, Mr Ramasamy came round clapping his hands like a redcoat at a religious holiday camp: ‘Right, right, right! Time to rise up!’ I pulled my dhoti over my face and pretended not to hear. Mr R was insistent.
‘Shake a leg, Mr Michael: two hours to perform ablutions.’ As there were only two loos and two taps, it struck me that this might have been cutting it a little fine. I turned over, discovering new mosquito bites to scratch, and then looked up to see a queue of ladies standing over me, toothbrushes and soap in hand. Mr Ramasamy had clearly already identified me as the potential weak link in tour discipline. ‘Sunrise is at 6.30, Mr Michael. There is no time to lose.’
*
The idea was that we should get down to the shore to see the sun rise over the Indian Ocean at the same time as the moon set over the Arabian Sea. We would bathe, worship in the temple, and enjoy what Appar calls ‘the fresh air of Comari’. All that before another long day on the bus. I drank a little tepid water from the bottle, ate an apple and then set off with Mala through the desultory little town. We walked down to the sea along a damp road lined with an untidy sprawl of hostels, cafés and concrete shops selling trinkets and souvenirs: tourist mandapas fringing a sacred shore. At the end, a rocky promontory opened out in front of us, indented with little coves and beaches, where the traditional eleven holy bathing spots are to be found. Behind us, tall palm trees shook their old heads in the wind, dark green against an indigo cloud bank.
Out in the sea, just beyond the southernmost point of the land, are two rocks half-submerged by the waves; these are the Pitru and Matru tirthas: they are reachable at low water along a path of iron poles linked by chains which were negotiated by the women slowly and gingerly, soaked to the skin as the swell slapped them in the face and tugged at their feet. These rocks mark the symbolic – and actual – limit of India, the holy land which stretches from this point two thousand miles northwards to the snowy peaks of Kashmir and the primeval wastes of Kailash and Manasarovar.
Every religious Hindu will come here once in a lifetime to take a holy bath and to make offerings to the memory of his mother, father and ancestors. Left to itself this would truly have been a divine spot, but like all famous sacred places it has gathered a wealth of unsightly accretions over time. On the beach the Indian government has constructed a large concrete ‘Gandhi mandapa’ to commemorate the place where the ashes of the ‘Father of the Nation’, the Mahatma, rested before they were consigned to the waves here. On an offshore island there is a memorial to the Hindu nationalist Swami Vivekananda, which rather resembles Bombay’s Victoria railway terminus. It commemorates what is viewed here as a signal moment in the history of modern India.
On Christmas Day 1892 Vivekananda swam to the island to spend the night meditating on Mother India and the validity of her Great Tradition in the face of the challenge of modernity. Here he resolved ‘to dedicate himself to the service of the Motherland and to spread the message of the Vedas’. So inspired, the next year he spoke at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago, affirming the unity of all religion, as Gandhi would do after him, and, unlikely as it may seem now, announced that it was for America now ‘to proclaim to all quarters of the globe that the Lord is in every faith’. At root, though, was the Swami’s conviction that India’s ancient traditions could be a vehicle for spiritual and cultural renovation in the future; an idea which it would seem is now being definitively rejected by the middle classes of Bombay and Delhi.
Above the beach were the old walls of the shrine: a massively built squat rectangle of Weathered granite daubed with faded white and crimson stripes, the old colours of the deity: red for Siva, white for the goddess – the primary colours of life. You will still see natural stones painted like this out in the countryside, some the size of a house, and though it is difficult to prove, this custom must be prehistoric. We sat by the sea under heavy cloud, waiting for dawn, but never glimpsed the sun. At seven we went up to the gate for the first puja. By then a long queue stretched round the walls, poor people from the villages, many in loincloth, singlet and bare feet, some with shaved head plastered with bright yellow sandal paste, all coming to make a vow to the goddess; people who had probably come on a ten-rupee country bus trip from Tinnevelly or Trivandrum rather than a video bus from further afield.
The temple is one of the most famous of the sacred places of the Hindus, but is simple, bare and functional. Behind a big wooden gate is a sparse outer courtyard empty of ornament and swept by the sea breezes. Beyond is an inner enclosure with a covered colonnade around the central shrine. No subtlety of religious pageant here, no elaborate play for our entertainment. They wake the goddess up with conch shell and trumpet. She stands alone behind a curtain in the sanctum, holding a rosary, an ancient black stone idol with a white face like a Japanese Noh dancer. This is rare. Southern goddesses are usually dark, black, blue or green like Minakshi; but the Devi here is the Virgin, her face ‘lovely as the moon’ as it says in the Mahabharata. Her whiteness signifies the retention of female power, so her energy, her sakti, can overcome all evil: ‘Marvellous in her serenity and beneficence’, according to the pilgrims’ guide I bought at Higginbotham’s station bookstall at Trichy Junction.
Comari is one of the few places south of the Deccan which appear in the list of India’s sacred sites in the Mahabharata, a list which may go back to the middle of the first millennium BC, and which in any case preserves a very archaic sense of her sacred geography. The ancient temple to the Devi was mentioned over two thousand years ago by the Greek geographers, starting with Eratosthenes. In a first-century Greek merchant’s manual there is this fascinating note: ‘Those who wish to consecrate the closing part of their lives to religion come here and bathe and vow themselves to celibacy. This is also done by women, for they say that the goddess dwelt here and bathed.’
So, as Indian shrines go, it is one of the earliest on record, and its early references invite questions: How old is the idea of India as a holy land? And who originated it? ‘Aryans’ or ‘Dravidians’? Did Bronze Age sea-going merchants gain a sense of the shape and size of the subcontinent, from the Himalayas to the Cape? When we look at yogic gods in Indus seals, or Mesolithic dancing gods with tridents, it is hard not to think that the roots of Indian religion are earlier by far than her civilization.
After the puja we strolled down to the shore and bought some sea shells from vendors on the beach, little conches which are used by sadhus as talismans. Then we breakfasted in a café. I ate alone. A soggy dosa (there’s tourism for you). Mala revealed that as part of her pilgrimage vow, she and her friends on the bus were fasting for the duration. She would only take some warm milk. Then we went shopping. My old sandals had finally broken and I looked for some flipflops, but Mala would not allow me to pay thirty rupees: ‘too costly’ she said with a frown.
Later we took the boat to Vivekananda’s island across a 200–yard stretch of choppy sea. The sun was now starting to break through the banks of cloud. Up the coast was a big fishing port with a huge Christian church, its spire a gleaming white against a backdrop of damp green hills. Comari district has been a stronghold of Catholicism since Xavier’s mission in the 1550s – though the Catholic fishermen still revere the Devi and participate enthusiastically in her festivals.
We sat for a while on the beach with one of Mala’s friends, Mrs Vaideyen, a thin bird-like lady in her seventies with a lovely face and a big open toothy smile: she was still very beautiful. She wore a thin crimson sari, a Kashmir shawl and an old orange balaclava. She lived in Madras now near her grown-up children, having moved there after her husband died a couple of years earlier. She had come back down to Chidambaram to travel with old friends and neighbours on the Murugan pilgrimage.
As we talked I realized that I had met her late husband, a tall, distinguished, grey-haired man, who had been a schoolteacher. We had met one night some years before at Chidambaram’s winter festival when he had stopped in South Car Street to teach us the opening verse of Manikavasagar’s ‘Maidens’ song’. He had died the next year, she said, aged seventy-eight.
‘He had been helping organize a special puja at Sirkali. He was rushing back and forwards every day when he had a heart attack, but when it began he still had time to put the ash on his forehead and to pray. He had the name Siva on his lips when he died.’
She opened her hands and shrugged her shoulders, raising her eyes heavenward; this had been a blessing.
‘He was a primary teacher, but his great love was the Tevaram: he knew all the poems off by heart. He used to say that these songs were the heart of Tamil culture. In retirement he used to offer classes after school by the south gopura to any of the town’s children whose families were interested in continuing the tradition.
‘He learned them from the class of people here who sing in Tamilian, the oduvars, the traditional poets of the Tamil lands. They are secular people, non-Brahmins, and you may still find them at places such as Sirkali, near Chidambaram. There the temple offered free instruction to popularize the Tevaram; my husband used to take the bus after school on Fridays and sit at their feet. Over the years he learned them all; many thousands of verses.’
I told her how her husband taught Rebecca and me a verse of Manikavasagar. She smiled. ‘He was his favourite poet. He used to say: “No one sheds tears over the Sanskrit Vedas, but you have a heart of stone if you are not moved by Manikavasagar, wherever you come from.” This was why he wanted to teach the children when he retired. He saw this as a religious duty. So the poems would be passed on to the young.
‘We were a like-minded couple.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘When our children married and settled down, when we had discharged our duties as householders and parents, we set out on a great adventure. It had always been my husband’s ambition to visit all the sites in the sacred journeys of the Tevaram: there are 274 of them. This we set out to do and over many years we did it. All except Kailash in Tibet and the two shrines in Sri Lanka. And in each place we stood together before the shrine of the god and sang the hymn which the saints had composed about that place.’
She smiled as if it had been plain sailing. Then she coughed and pulled her old orange balaclava over her head. She was feverish and after early rain the morning was still not hot. How many now, I wondered, would follow in her footsteps?
*
As we headed back to the bus, the wind swept the last of the clouds over the hills to the north. It was now a lovely day with a warm sun and a daffodil sky. Shining green paddies, rich glistening groves of coco palms, banana and bamboo; the rain had made everything come alive. Soon we headed off towards Nagercoil. To the right we passed the isolated mountain which marks the very end of the long chain of the Western Ghats, the spine of India. The dramatic pyramidal hill rises sheer out of the flat coastal plain, broken off from the main range which stretches off into the distance beyond. (It must be the one depicted by the English artists the Daniell brothers in the 1780s in one of their most memorable compositions.) This mysterious green mountain is called Maruda Malai – ‘Medicine Mountain’ – the place where healing plants grow. There is a legend about it, as there appears to be for almost every place in the south. This is the tale told me by Mr Subrahmaniam, a very sweet gentleman, who was travelling two seats behind me on the bus with his wife and teenage son. He was a tax inspector for one of the divisions of Chidambaram district.
‘During the tale of the Ramayana, when Rama had crossed into Lanka by the magical bridge built with the aid of Hanuman and the monkey king, Rama’s youngest brother Lakshman was hit by an arrow dipped in deadly snake poison, which was fired by a son of the demon king Ravana. Lakshman lay unconscious and near to death. Rama was plunged into great anxiety, and asked Hanuman the monkey god, his faithful companion, to hasten to Mount Kailash in the Himalaya to bring back the medicinal herb called sanjeevini, which alone is the antidote to all the world’s poisons. Hanuman did so, but when he got there, he saw the mountain was covered with herbs and flowers, and he was at a loss to know which was the right one. So he uprooted the whole hill, which was called medicine hill, and brought it down to Rama. But as he flew across to Sri Lanka, a piece of the mountain fell here, near Cape Comorin, and this is the hill today called Maruda Malai.’
He smiled.
‘Of course these are ancient stories in which the common people take delight. We need not take them literally; the point is that they are beautiful tales, and give entertainment. But they are part of the religion of the ordinary folk, and you will find a love of these stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in every corner of India. Lately, of course, they have been very popular on TV, even among our Muslim and Christian neighbours.’
He looked out of the window.
‘But it is a peculiarity of this place that in the rainy season, many kinds of medicinal herbs, which are used in the preparation of Ayurvedic remedies, grow wild on its slopes. They are a veritable pharmacopoeia of the traditional healing. The local people even cook the leaves of certain trees here, and the bitter grass which grows on the hill. It is said that after the battle with Ravana, and the conquest of Lanka, Hanuman installed a Siva linga on the mountain, as a thanksgiving for sorting out his medical emergency. And to this day, this linga is there on top, and visited and worshipped by pilgrims, particularly by those holy men and women who come down to Cape Comorin on foot in fulfilment of vows. It is one of the rituals they accomplish after bathing at the Cape, to bring their journey to a satisfying end.’
Suchindram. A big temple with an ornate tower standing by a pretty tank which reflected the old, red-tiled houses and the now cloudless blue sky. A notice outside in three languages stresses that the temple is open to all castes. Technically untouchables were allowed in all temples down here after Independence, but in practice this is still by no means everywhere the case. To enter, men must strip off and wear only a dhoti round the waist. I did so, and stood there by the bus trying to look inconspicuous, a foot higher than all my companions, my skin ghastly pale next to the luminous ebony of Raja and Ganesh. Mala and her friends laughed, as did the crowd at the pilgrim stalls. I was grateful to escape from the unsparing sunlight of the street into the shadows of the interior.
The temple is chiefly remarkable for its extraordinary sequence of epigraphical records, and for its very rich – some would say over-rich – stone carving. The chap from the local government was in his element, eyes glowing with justifiable pride.
‘It is a treasure house of art and sculpture,’ he enthused. ‘Where else in the world would you see such things?’
He insisted I try out the four famous musical pillars. Each is cut out of a single block of granite into clusters of cylindrical rods which emit musical notes when struck by a wooden stave.
‘There. This is the harp sound. And this the drum. You see, a symphony in praise of the Lord.’
I confessed that I could hear no difference. Perhaps I simply lacked the ear of faith? He wagged his head reprovingly. ‘The point is, the Western ear is not trained as ours to detecting halftones and quarter-tones,’ he suggested, and clearing his throat, demonstrated with a scale from a Carnatic raga. My ear remained dull and blockish.
One of the halls of the temple is carved entirely with incidents from the Ramayana; another has Hanuman, Siva as mendicant and Krishna with his flute, a vast anthology in stone of all-Indian mythology. For good measure there were Pali inscriptions of Ashoka with Tamil translations. These texts from the third century BC, the time of the great Mauryan empire, are our first documentary records of the traditional dynasties of the south, the Cholas, Pandyas and Pallavas, some of whose descendants, it is extraordinary to recall, were still ruling in these parts when the British East India Company landed its armies in the eighteenth century. Around the back was a little sunlit corner: a gnarled old pipal tree caught in a pool of sunlight, a cluster of ancient stone lingas and snake stones entwined in its roots; it was strewn with blossoms and smeared with fresh sandalwood and vermilion, incense smoke curling across a beam of light.
We were about to leave when the local ice-cream man cycled furiously up to the bus on a three-wheeler with a wooden ice-box crammed with home-made lollies (the box lovingly hand-painted with flowers and lettered: ‘Jothi ices, home-made of best ingredients’). Then we set off for Courtallam.
We left Tinnevelly behind, passing through little country towns and a landscape full of old buildings, temples and tanks out in the paddy-fields, their brickwork overgrown and crumbling; granite slabs lay displaced as nature took them back. The new is far less evident than the decay of the old. How strong here is this sense of dissolution and change as some key to life, as things decay back into their constituent elements, the elements celebrated in the temples. And even the greatest temples are impermanent, as impermanent in the eyes of Siva as the kolams of rice flour on the doorstep, blown away or rubbed into the dust at the threshold even before the sun reaches its height.
Travelling in this countryside gave a sense of why the Hindu religion is the way it is. Fecundity and barrenness; plenty and scarcity; violence and balm, a climate which alternates between benign calm and enervating extremes of heat; the irresistible violence of cyclone, monsoon or flood, when the ancient banyans along the roads are thrown on to their heads like clods of soil. Even the buildings, the ornate, pillared halls, the gopuras sprouting like petrified vegetation, seem to grow out of the palm forests like weird hybrids, part plant, part stone.
Not surprising then, given all this, that the myths of Tamil culture are given to the most intense extremes of expression, from the Cholan bronzes to today’s Tamil movies with their make-believe violence and their barely suppressed sexuality. Even more than the rest of India, perhaps, Tamil culture is preoccupied with the attractions of excess, and the correspondingly extreme idea of restraint and control – and an awareness of the dynamic tension and conflict which inevitably comes out of their coexistence.
The day had grown very hot indeed by the time we reached Ambasamudram. No restaurant here could seat so many people, so they improvised, laying sixty banana leaves down in an upstairs corridor, where we all sat cross-legged like a line of beggars outside a temple choultry. Then the boy came down ladling food out of his buckets: vegetable sambhar, rice, curd, black-eyed beans, okra, a kind of celery in egg and lemon sauce, orange chutney, tamarind pickle: all beautifully prepared, and for seven rupees each.
Through the afternoon we pressed on down a winding country road, the wooded flanks of the Western Ghats getting nearer and nearer on our left-hand side. Gardens of nutmeg, clove, cinnamon and coffee; the velvet sheen of tea plantations in the lowering sun. Then we turned off into a bowl of hills cut by deep valleys. At 3.30 we reached Courtallam and stopped in the bus park behind the old Siva temple. Around us unfolded a beautiful landscape, which was often painted and engraved by artists during the British period when people came up here to take the waters and escape the heat. An Arcadian place, it was often said; it would take a Claude Lorraine to do justice to its ancient spirit.
Mala’s husband used to come here when he was a boy, before he lost his sight, and it is one of his imperishable memories from the days when he could still see; how in July as the heat lessens after the first rains have fallen along the wooded mountains bordering Kerala, the waters rise above Courtallam, the river swells and the falls become full. Then, he said, on July mornings ‘the spray hangs in the air in tiny droplets like a kind of mist, catching the rays of sunlight, casting a myriad rainbows around the sides of the falls’. To him, it was a vision of glory.
A new hydroelectric plant has been built now higher upstream so the flow of water is not what it was. But when the monsoon falls on Kerala in June, the Chittar river still swells and reaches full flow in July. It still has a good head in October, crashing two hundred feet, cascading over a sheer precipice which is broken about halfway down by a deep trough in the face of the rock. In the old days it was a wild place: cliffs hung with trees, ferns and creepers, pock-marked with caves, rock-cut terraces and carvings, where many sadhus, men and women, had taken up residence. (There are still a few.) Below the falls the temples, mandapas and hostels were set back on the left bank of the stream in a very picturesque setting, drawn in the eighteenth century by the English artists, the Daniells, who did so much to fix the picturesque view of India in European art. Inevitably, with the huge growth of pilgrimage, the place has been taken over by modern concrete buildings plastered with advertising hoardings, and the river has an ugly new bridge draped with electric power lines. The place is still wonderful, but its divinity has been hedged by the modern world.
Dodging hawkers, we crossed the bridge, and I sat with Mala’s bags and clothes as she went for a dip. There are three main sections to the falls here: the women’s falls are at the left; the right-hand fall is mainly used by children and older people; in the middle there is a very powerful current and a concrete safety rail. Here the young men swagger and josh each other, having a laugh and a bit of horseplay. Some balance on isolated rocks as if daring the current to knock them off into the river below. Soon Mala came back dripping wet and went to change. When she returned I stripped off to a loincloth and headed for the young men’s section to whistles from the crowd – again I was the only foreigner here. They held out their hands and pulled me in. The force of the central flow was just about bearable; after a dawn start and six hours in a hot bus, it was deliriously cool and good to taste: the water pressing on my head, pummelling my face and rushing into my mouth.
‘What conduces much to the restoration of invalids at this singular abode,’ wrote the author of the British Medical Report in 1832,
is the little waterfall, under which most of the Europeans daily bathe. The falling of the water, after the first shock is over, gives an indescribable feeling of pleasure; by its constant beating, it quickens the circulation and produces a fine glow all over the body; and has, besides, the further good effects of dispelling languor, raising the spirits, exciting appetite, and promoting digestion in a superior degree to any other kind of bathing that we are acquainted with. It has, in consequence of these virtues, together with the delightful climate of the valley itself, been the happy means of rapidly restoring many to health and comfort who previous to their visit to Cortallam appeared to be hastening to their graves.
Feeling suitably rejuvenated I went back to Mala, who immediately shooed me back into the water: ‘It’s not enough – this is too short a stay. You must stand for a minimum of ten minutes to get full benefits.’ So back I went. Then we all decamped from the main falls to the Five Falls, a tree-shrouded fairy grotto where five streams pour down crevices in the black rock. There we went through the same ritual again as the sun sank behind the hills and the skin tingled with cold. I was photographed with half-naked priests (Raja and Ganesh), the beaming tax inspector, the manager of a worsted mill from Coimbatore and the back four of a football team from Tinnevelly who somehow got in on the picture. Eyes twinkling, Mr Ramasamy barked out one more of his aruvai joks as I snapped him, while the now chilly water dripped off the end of his beaky nose. Mala then took the camera to take some pictures of her neighbours. The tax inspector shepherded us all into line; everyone by now seemed excited and there was a great feeling of togetherness. Soaked to the skin, little Minakshi’s face was lit up, her huge eyes wide, as she held her aunt’s hand for their photo. Her aunt allowed herself the faintest of smiles as she balanced on a glistening mossy rock in a clinging marigold sari, still managing to exude auspicious female power even when she looked as if she’d been pulled through a mangle.
The tax inspector came over in a voluminous pair of underpants and gave me a fatherly smile. ‘So now you are getting into it. Now I am sure you will begin to feel the benefit of our Indian holy places.’ I was. I can remember other memorable dips in Indian sacred waters: at the freezing confluence of the Ganga and the Jumna; in crashing breakers at Puri; in the Ganga in Benares in the late summer when the river is high and has the temperature and thickness’ of strong brown tea; but the falls at Courtallam surpassed them all; they were exactly as Rajdurai had promised. Perhaps the tax inspector was right: I was beginning to feel that I might after all garner a little spiritual merit from this journey.
Early in the evening we drove into Tenkasi. Set back from the road was a gigantic gopura, pale in the half light. Inside were wonderfully sculpted halls depicting scenes from the Mahabarata. The local tax inspector was now warming to the whole thing. ‘These stories we imbibe with our mothers’ milk,’ he said, describing the ‘Exile in the Forest’; then came a hall with Siva’s dance portrayed, the fierce and smiling dance on adjacent pillars and the constantly recurring myth of Siva’s dance competition with the black goddess Kali. ‘See how they have been carved, such huge figures, with such delicacy. Here the artist’s hand found speech.’
After puja we sat together in the arcade.
‘These holy places we call tirthas. In Sanskrit this means crossing place of a river. In ancient times many sacred places were on holy rivers. But also tirtha means crossing place between human world and divine. God appeared on earth in these places. So they are especially suited to approach the deity now. They are crossing places between different worlds. In your country?’
‘In my country, Mr Subrahmaniam, we have completely lost the sense of two worlds.’
With that he turned to me with a worried look, hesitant, as if anxious not to offend.
‘Tell me one thing, Mr Michael. This has perplexed me during our journey. You are Christian. How do you reconcile this in your conscience with attending our rituals?’
Outside, big drops of rain were falling again. Sound of rain pattering on leaves.
‘I cannot really call myself a Christian,’ I began. ‘I don’t go to church or anything like that. I suppose you might say I’m just curious.’
‘About the god?’
‘About Tamil culture, about being Tamil. Anyway, I thought Hindus think the truth of all religions is ultimately the same?’
‘Indeed, this is what Lord Krishna says to Arjuna in the Gita.’
‘I think that too. And still, as Mrs Mala says, I feel a great heartliness in being here.’
‘It is all that matters in the end. As the saints say, the key is not in the temples or the idols or the holy baths, but in your own heart.’
Outside, flashes of lightning suddenly illuminated the horizon of townscape, silhouetting the gopura black against the night. Tremendous thunder. We hurried across the enclosure as the drops of rain fell on our backs. We ran past a huge tree hung with prayers and requests. The rain started to pour. We left the town with the wipers on monsoon setting. How on earth could the driver see through it? There followed a death-defying journey to Srivilliputtur, driver and assistant craning forwards as water cascaded over the windscreen. On the narrow road, buses and lorries approached head on out of the night, swerving with inches to spare. I kept flinching. Raja just laughed. Above our heads, MGR danced on.
At nine o’clock we reached Srivilliputtur. A great Vaishnavite shrine with a gigantic gopura soaring nearly 250 feet in elegant curves, the entire structure swathed in bamboo scaffolding and rattan screens. Vast and truly impressive. This is a temple to Vishnu but is celebrated all over the south because of the legend of the mystic poetess, Andal, who lived here in the ninth century. Here we stopped for our evening meal.
It is a huge campus. We had missed the last puja so people went off to do a bit of sightseeing as the priests locked up the sanctum, and we all bought bags of goa, the milk sweet for which the town is famous. The big nave was packed with Vaishnavite pilgrim pictures and souvenirs, including cassettes and books of Andal’s songs; but supposing myself to be temperamentally more of a Saivite, I gave them a miss.
Outside the nave was a wide sandy approach with gardens over to one side. My dhoti was in tatters after the frolicking at Courtallam, so I went out into the street to buy a new one at a textile stall run by an old Muslim gentleman in a white embroidered cap; Srivilliputtur’s Muslim weavers are one of the town’s mainstays. His cavernous shop had polished wooden shelves, and an open carpeted floor where rolls of cloth could be spread out. Behind his desk sticks of incense were burning by a row of holy pictures just as in any Hindu shop. Here, though, they showed Mecca and Medina; he had scenes of Indian Muslim saints performing supernatural feats of endurance, riding tigers and charming snakes just like Hindu holy men. He also had a poster which is popular throughout south India: it depicts Buraq the magical horse who transported the Prophet on his night journey and on his ascent to heaven – an elaborately bejewelled winged centaur with pink body and peacock-feather wings and, to cap it all, a beautiful woman’s face with made-up eyes and lipstick.
The wonders of Indian Muslim art remain emphatically Indian. When we see the gorgeously half-human Buraq, or the Shia Imam Ali represented as an avatar of Vishnu at Lucknow or Hyderabad, or even the Prophet himself with the attributes of Krishna (as he appears in Tamil literary epic), we understand that in India Muslim art could never quite break with the Hindu vision.
Islam’s battle with representational art makes a long and fascinating story. It starts as early as the remarkable Hellenistic-style figural art from early Islamic Jordan. Later, in the fertile artistic climate of medieval Persia, the iconoclasts could only ever have been partially successful. Here in India they were forced to give way before the overwhelming need to make images of everything.
In the busy main street Mala paced up and down searching for a good eating place. Though she was not taking food herself, she was concerned that I had a clean place with good cooking. Eventually we found brightly lit ‘hotel’ with dosai and she watched me eat. She looked tired: but then she was now in her third day of fasting. I asked her about the legend of Andal, the patron saint of the town. It turned out to be a tale which rather resembled that of the bride of Christ, Teresa of Avila, though with distinctly erotic undertones.
‘Andal was a foundling girl, discovered in a basket by the river: she was fostered by a priest at the temple.
‘From very young age she was seized by the desire to marry Vishnu. Secretly each morning she was decking herself in the fresh garlands with which her foster-father was supposed to adorn the image of Vishnu. This was sacrilege, as it is forbidden for anyone even to smell fresh flowers which are to be dedicated to the deity.’
The girl would fantasize about union with Vishnu: what it would be like. (‘What will his kiss be like: does it taste like fresh lotus blossom, or camphor? Or is it as sweet as honey?’) When she put on the flowers, she would look in the mirror to see if she was lovely enough to be his bride. She saw nothing wrong in this: she was pure-hearted. Certain of her poems indeed are frankly erotic (‘Enter me and leave the imprint of your saffron paste on my breasts… mixing, churning, maddening me inside’). Mala says these are less well known, and not often publicly performed.
The waiter came over to lay a fresh green plantain leaf on my table, which I sprinkled and brushed with water, leaving a shower of tiny droplets over the soft matt ribbed surface of the leaf. Then my special dosa arrived: a crisp pancake of ground rice and lentils, two feet across. I discovered I was ravenous. Mala continued the story.
‘When her foster-father discovered her sacrilege, he was upset and prayed to Vishnu to ask him what to do. Vishnu then appeared to him in a dream saying that Andal gave an added fragrance to the flowers which was dear to him. So she was blessed, chosen by god. Aged sixteen she went to the island of Srirangam, the greatest Vishnu shrine in India, and vanished in the sanctum; she was never seen again. Taken by God.’
(Andal’s cult had already spread across the Tamil lands by the twelfth century, when there were special recitals of her works. Later generations could not resist filling in the gaps in the tale by providing love letters to her from Vishnu.)
‘In Margali month, which is December time, all over Tamil Nadu she is celebrated every morning on the radio; there are recitations of her Tiruppavai poem in temples and at home gatherings. You can buy it on cassette. Young girls especially sing verses of it to make a happy marriage; often they make vows to rise before dawn each day to bathe and recite the entire poem. Each morning a special puja is still done here, where garlands are put on Vishnu after first being put on Andal; this is in memory of the tale.’
As always, Mala had infinite patience with my questions. Where, I wondered, had all this knowledge come from. Had she always been religious like this? It was something I had never asked. She answered by going back into her past life:
‘After we married in 1959, my husband worked as a clerk in Pondicherry, and the children were brought up there until the loss of his sight during the late seventies and early eighties led to him losing his job and returning to Chidambaram on a tiny disability pension to live. It was then, about twelve years ago, I started to find out more.’
‘So when your husband went blind?’
‘From that time I started to question an old religious lady in the town about the religious stories. She was a widow, over seventy years old. She knew the poems of the saints, the Tevaram, and had visited most of the sites in their sacred journeys. She was also a Saiva.’
(Among Tamils, I should add, you will often find a sense that Saivism is the indigenous religion of the south; Vaishnavism is more identified with the Sanskritic, Brahminical, pan-Indian culture, especially in the figures of Rama and Krishna. Saiva is held to be the ‘old religion’ and this has left its marks in the language. For example, when you sit down at table to eat vegetarian food, as we were doing, this is called in Tamil ‘Saiva sapede’, ‘Saiva food’.) Mala continued her tale as I demolished my dosa and ordered another.
‘Till then I had been religious, but only as most people are in our community. But from that time I became filled with the desire to know.’
So she started to learn all the sthalapuranas, the myths of the individual temples, the special qualities of the different shrines. Following the sacred paths, she made trips all over the south, scrutinizing the almanac and mastering the seasonal calendar for festivals, eclipses, days of largesse, days of abstinence, the special properties of vilva, neem and pipal. She could recite all the great sites and days: the sacred marriage in Madurai in May; Tiruvannamali in November, when a huge fire burns for three days and nights on the summit of the pyramidal mass of the Red Mountain, which rises sheer out of the central plain; Tirupugalur in April, when, in one of the most enthralling rites anywhere in India, Appar is celebrated at the very time and place of his death, in the sanctum in the dead of night, when the lights are extinguished and his last poem is recited: ‘Lord now I am come to your lotus feet.’
These values she had passed on to her children. Yet at the same time she had fought to give her four daughters the best secular education they could manage. She had got Bharati into technical college in Nagapattinam, and when relatives wouldn’t help take her there, Mala took her there herself. She wanted to equip them for the modern world, even though she herself was still committed to the old ways of caste and stars. For her the two were by no means incompatible. She still believed, for example, that this was the best way of finding a good husband, a compatible person for a marriage within the community; ‘god will make sure you get on.’ So she took on the male duties of householder, while falling back on the old powers to shore things up, keep things from breaking apart, protect the family and children in hard times. Yet in the end in her heart of hearts I suspect she knew that only hard work could mitigate the pains that flesh is heir to.
It was time to go. We trooped back on to the bus for the last journey of the day – three hours more to Tirupparakunram. Even Mala was nodding by now. A tiring business, the pilgrimage.
Towards one we turned off the Madurai road into the long lane which leads up to the temple and the great rock. They had had no rain here, and when we got down from the bus there was soft dry sand between the toes. The street was gaily decorated for the temple festival, hung with flags and figured cloths; in the middle was a big marquee canopied with sewn elephants and peacocks. Beyond was the entrance gopura draped in fairy lights. Tirupparakunram is another of the abodes of Murugan and was in the middle of the same ten-day celebration that we had seen at Tiruchendur. A lovely atmosphere lingered around the late tea stalls as we asked around to find somewhere to stay. There was no room in the first choultries we asked. One was for Brahmins only. We of course were of many castes (though there were no untouchables on the bus). Finally Mr Ramasamy came out of a darkened building with a sleepy-looking choultry manager, and we were ushered into an old-style pilgrim lodge on the approach to the temple: they had a vacant communal room upstairs: a hundred rupees for the whole party.
We found ourselves in a columned entrance hall with latticed screens over the windows; on either side a narrow stone staircase led to the first floor where there was a long dormitory with a hard floor of painted lime plaster. A heavy old fan with a nose like a Spitfire propeller wobbled alarmingly in the roof. The first ones to get up the stairs had already earmarked the floor underneath it. We made space for ourselves, spreading our dhotis or sari cloths on the floor ready to lie down for the rest of the night, women, children, men all mixed up together. The wash place was outside, downstairs at the back; it was rather like the backyard of a temple, with water drawn in buckets from a stone tank under a starry sky. To one side was a row of cubicles for loos which in no time were hung with sari cloths. I stretched out to get some sleep while Mr Ramasamy delivered the next day’s programme. I’d brought a mosquito net, but somehow I’d have felt a bit of a cissy trying to use it. In any case, where would one hang it? Now it came into its own as a pillow. Mr Ramasamy came over:
‘Here’s a good joke for you, Mr Michael. One lady says to her neighbour: “I like your new milkman; he is handsome as a movie star: What’s his name?” Neighbour replies: “Paul Newman”.’ (He pronounced Paul as Paal).
A blank look from the floor.
‘I don’t get it, Mr Ramasamy,’ I said.
‘In Tamil paal is milk. See? Paal Newman–new milkman! Good?’
He shrugged his shoulders despairingly. ‘Mr Michael, you are needing to learn much more Tamil if you are to enjoy the Tamil sense of humour.’
I slept like a log till 4.30 when Mr Ramasamy’s wake-up call interrupted my dreams of many-armed gods and goddesses and smiling anthropomorphs. We had the usual two hours to go through our ablutions before the first puja in the temple. The washing area was crowded by the time I got down. Raja had another plan. The temple itself had a particularly spacious bathing tank which would be great for an early morning bath. Did I fancy that? Certainly, I said. They didn’t offer to show me the way. So off I went on my own at five, still pitch dark, in a thin, small dhoti clutching my soap box, walking down the streets of Tirupparakunram. The air was blissfully fresh and cool. I got a cheery wave from the tea stalls where they were heating up the first brew of the day. But otherwise, no one paid the slightest bit of notice to this thin foreign body, pale as a ghost, wandering their streets in search of a holy bath.
I found it at last, a lake-sized reservoir with stepped sides and a columned mandapa on an island in the middle. As the sky faintly lightened to the east, I could see that it was cut mainly out of the living rock and filled by water courses which channelled rainwater off the great bare shoulders of the hill – cold, deep water into which I did not wish to stray too far in the darkness. The water closed over my head with exhilarating sharpness. Standing up I sucked in my breath and swore to myself in pleasure; after a short while I tried to climb out, and feeling for the slimy steps I tripped and fell over.
‘Bugger.’
‘You are from which country?’ said a sudden voice from nowhere. White short-sleeved shirt and whites of eyes; gradually I made out a young man clutching a spring folder. Naked and dripping I picked myself up, grabbed my dhoti, and tried to look perfectly normal while he stared, faintly bemused, and kept the conversation going with series of questions. It transpired he was on the way to the bus stand to go to the college in Madurai where he was studying English literature.
‘Did you see Mr Peter Prook’s Mahabharata?’
‘Mmm.’
‘What is your opinion?’
‘I saw the stage show: very exciting. Loved it when they set the stage on fire. What did you think?’
His face puckered.
‘This was cheap magic. Not satisfactory. Generally it was not liked in India. How can you put the world’s longest poem into seven hours when recital takes seven days? Also Indian people do not behave like these actors. And Bhima was played by an African; this did not go down at all well with an Indian audience. Bhima has a wheaten complexion; he is not a black man. We consider the TV version of Mr Ramanand Sagar was wholly preferable.’
‘Why?’ I asked, squeezing out my wet dhoti and wrapping myself with the towel. I squeezed out some toothpaste and brushed vigorously.
‘They spoke like gods to start with. In epic style. We did not understand it all. Even the actors did not understand it all. But it was in the language of the gods. Every Sunday morning people even did their pujas in front of the TV screen. Ninety episodes. It was biggest-ever audience on TV. Even the Muslims were fans.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Also they looked like gods. You see we know what gods look like,’ he said, with absolute certainty.
‘Krishna in particular is strong, majestic, powerful and noble. And he is blue. This Krishna was the wrong colour. This is the last straw. You might as well have had Prince Hamlet played by a girl.’
‘Actually we have.’
‘There,’ he said, ‘this only proves the point. You have lost touch with your tradition. The important thing is not innovation, but following of the tradition. In India this is what the people love best. Mr Brook’s Krishna was strong and powerful. But he did not speak like the god. And he was the wrong colour.’
I made as if to go.
‘Do you have a visiting card?’
I rummaged vainly for a moment in imaginary pockets.
‘I’m sorry… I’m afraid I didn’t bring one.’
The light was coming up fast now on the brown pyramid of rock behind us. I scribbled my address on his pad, and agreed to correspond further on the matter of Mr Brook’s dramaturgy. I then hurried back to meet Mala and Minakshi and her aunt and grandmother at the tea stall by the temple gate.
The temple at Tirupparakunram is another ancient and famous place on the Tamil pilgrimage routes. It is dramatically situated at the bottom of a precipitous granite rock known as Skandamalai, which rises over 1000 feet straight out of the plain. The rock is dotted with ancient caves and rock sanctuaries and holy springs; it has been a place of worship since prehistory and sacred at one time or other to Saivites, Vaishnavites, Jains and Muslims. Orthodox pilgrims not only climb it but circumambulate the base where there is a path with wayside shrines. Right on top there is an old Muslim tomb which is still visited and revered by Muslim pilgrims from the region; they call the hill Sikandermalai, ‘the rock of Sikander’, the Indian name for Alexander the Great. The tomb, however, dates from the brief and dramatic heyday of the Madura sultanate when Tirupparakunram was the capital of the Muslim state down here; it was the scene of one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the south. The tale takes us back to one of the most momentous events in the long history of India, the coming of Islam.
Muslim armies reached the Indus valley in 711, less than a century after the Prophet’s death. Between the tenth and twelfth centuries the Muslims overthrew the Hindu kingdoms of northern India in a bloody and traumatic irruption into Indian life, severing the people for ever from their native religions. But in the south this period was the zenith of Cholan power and achievement, with its unsurpassed temple architecture, bronze and stone sculpture, and literature. The Cholan navy ensured the south remained inviolate; in 1017 they even sent an army to the Ganges. At that time the kingdom based on Tanjore on the Cavery river conquered Sri Lanka and despatched fleets to the Maldives, Java, Sumatra and Malaya, leaving Hindu culture, which has survived till today in islands such as Bali. Their mercantile embassies visited Sung China and Chinese junks came to the Coromandel coast to trade their silk and porcelain – which is still found by the beachcomber, pounded into the surf line at the mouth of the Cavery.
Until the end of the twelfth century the Tamils were still a strong and wealthy naval power, people with whom the Chinese could do business, unlike the later Western buccaneers and entrepreneurs. For unlike the Westerners they were people who had not dispensed with their rituals, and in Chinese eyes this was the chief mark of a civilized people.
But through the 1200s, even as the last great building projects were under way at Chidambaram, Cholan power began to decline and the Muslim rulers of north India began to eye their wealth covetously. By now, of course, Islam was dominant from the Mediterranean to the Ganges. In the early fourteenth century the first large-scale attempt was made to attack the south. Plunder was no doubt the first objective. Sultan Allauddin Khilji of Delhi must have heard of the great temples and the extraordinary treasures kept in them; at Tanjore alone Rajaraja the Great had given 400 pounds of gold to his temple in 1010, along with many other treasures which were still there three centuries later. And Tanjore was just one temple among thousands. With the south now riven by civil war, and the Cholan dynasty in terminal decline, the chance must have seemed too good to resist.
The campaign against the south by the sultan’s general Malik Kafur began on 18 November 1310 and lasted for a full year, during which the southern Tamil lands were overrun, temples demolished, towns looted. In January 1311 they hit Trichy and attacked the great temple of Vishnu on the sacred island of Srirangam. The temple staff had no time to flee and a terrible massacre took place. The temple chronicle records the events of the time. A strange legend still told by the temple priests told how the cult statue of Vishnu was taken to Delhi, where it was rescued by a Muslim princess who fell in love with the face of the Lord and eventually restored it to the temple.
Many of the ancient temples in the Cavery valley must have been terrorized at this time, and some of the buried treasure troves uncovered in recent years must represent the desperate efforts of the priests to hide their old bronzes and temple treasures before the onslaught. It is tempting to think that this is the explanation for the great collection of temple bronzes from the eleventh century found in the 1950s buried around Tiruvengadu in the Cavery delta. The eighty bronzes found in a secret room in the 1960s in Chidambaram, which were mainly from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, may also have been concealed at this time. In many cases inscriptions record that a temple had collections of bronzes in the eleventh century which are represented today only by fourteenth-century or later copies. Rajaraja the Great, for instance, had sixty-six bronzes cast for his temple at Tanjore in 1010; of these only two survive today, one a damaged and repaired masterpiece.
As the destruction of the accumulated artistic treasures of a civilization, Kafur’s year-long campaign had few parallels in south Indian history. Are we to see it simply as motivated by greed? Or by religious fanaticism? The work of murderous bigots or of brutal warlords who, as in our own time, from Sudan to Bosnia, have used religion as a means of dispossessing minorities and lining their own coffers? At the time, it must be said, both sides saw the destruction as religiously motivated. The Koran, of course, provides both justification for, and explicit rejection of, such persecution. But for the more orthodox Muslims of the day, holding to the austere monotheism of their sacred book, worship of Hanuman the monkey god or the elephant-headed Ganesh was beyond the pale. However much Hindu philosophers might claim the linga of Siva as an aniconic ‘mark’ of god, in many temples it was all too explicitly phallic. No matter that Muslim and Hindu met in the more elevated doctrines of the Sufis and the bhakti singers; popular Hinduism to many Muslims was irredeemable (as it was to some British imperialists, even in our own century). Stories of the ‘womb chamber’ in Tanjore, where milk libations were poured over a twelve-foot-high polished black stone phallus with head and glans delineated, must have brought shivers of horror among the ulema in the durbar halls of Delhi. No doubt then it was as easy for Kafur to travel with chapter and verse in his baggage as it was for the Conquistadors. The scientist Al Biruni put it succinctly: ‘India is full of riches, entirely delightful, and, as its people are mainly infidels and idolaters, it is right by order of God for us to conquer them.’
In March 1311 Kafur reached the frontier of the Pandyan lands which were then rent by civil war, and marched on Madurai, raiding towns and villages and desecrating temples on his way. Alerted by events on the Cavery river, the priests in Madurai had time to hide their main treasures. The ‘womb chamber’ with the main linga of Siva was filled with earth and bricked up, and a new false linga built outside in the vestibule; scores of bronze processional images were buried; the statue of the goddess was hidden in the vimana, above the shrine; the gold treasures were carried off.
When Kafur reached Madurai on 10 April 1311, like Napoleon at Moscow, he found an empty city, for Sundara Pandya had fled with his family retainers and treasures. The chronicler Amir Khusru says, “They found the city empty, for the king had fled, leaving two or three elephants in the temple of Cokkanatha. The elephants were captured and the temple burned.’ Though the Pandyas were subsequently able to mount a counterattack and forced Kafur to retreat, it had been a disastrous time for the towns of the south, especially for their great and ancient shrines, full of the hoarded-up treasure of centuries. According to a relatively sober source, Kafur retreated with a vast baggage train loaded with loot, including 612 elephants, 20,000 horses and ninety-six measures of gold, the equivalent to 100 million gold coins. ‘At every corner,’ continued Khusru, ‘conquest opened a door to them, and in all that devastated land, wherever treasure remained hidden in the earth it was sifted, searched through and carted away so that nothing remained to the infidels of their gold but an echo, and of their gems, a flaming fire.’
Kafur’s raid was the prelude to an attempt at full-scale conquest and the brief and still obscure period of the Muslim sultanate of Madurai. It is a story which has attracted little attention in modern times; short, brutal and enigmatic, the tale is only now being untangled from the surviving remains of that time. In the following decade the south was subject to more raids; then Muslim governors appear in the Madurai region. In the 1340s these nabobs had proclaimed a sultanate of Madurai, in the story of which the hill of Tirupparakunram played a key part.
When the greatest of all travellers, Ibn Battuta, came here in 1342, he describes the Muslim capital of the south as a large city with well-built streets four miles away from old Madurai by the Vaigai river. His description of the capital matches Tirupparakunram, a Muslim planned town built at the bottom of the great rock. This must be the ‘city of Ma’bar’ recorded by Muslim historians: the capital of the sultanate, during the half century of its life, where eight sultans reigned until the last, Sikander Shah. Indeed, according to local Muslims the tomb on the hill at which they worship is none other than the tomb of this last sultan, killed here in the dramatic battle when the sultanate fell to the forces of the revived Hindu empire of Vijayanagar in 1377
The end of this ill-starred venture, is recorded by the Delhi historians. According to Shams Siraj, the last sultan had gone native, and worse:
He began to perform acts of indecency in public… when he held court in the audience hall he wore women’s ornaments on his wrists and ankles, and his neck and fingers were decked with feminine decorations. His indecent acts with pederasts were performed openly… [and] the people of Ma’bar were utterly and completely weary and out of patience with him and his behaviour. Then the Hindu army from Vijayanagar entered Ma’bar with a large force and magnificent elephants. They captured [Sikander] alive and killed him and took over the city of Ma’bar. They destroyed the whole of Ma’bar, which was a Muslim city, but also the Muslim women were taken by the Hindus. And [their leader] established himself as ruler of Ma’bar.
No doubt we can take the story with a pinch of salt. But Sikander was not the first – nor the last – to go native in the perfumed climate of Madurai. Most celebrated was the Jesuit Roberto de Nobili, who in 1605 donned the saffron and translated Tamil scriptures (the first Westerner to do so), attempting a meeting of Hinduism and the Bible through Christian Neoplatonism and Upanishadic mysticism. For forty years this unlikely figure walked the streets of Madurai with a shaven head and Saivite marks and was a strict vegetarian. He became known as the ‘teacher of reality’, Tattuva Bodhakar (as he still is among the older generation in the city which erected a statue to him not so long ago). It was perhaps the most extraordinary missionary experiment ever undertaken; he only drew the line at offerings to the linga in times of drought. Inevitably in the end the Vatican lost patience with the bold flights of his syncretisms.
There were others. In the early nineteenth century a British collector, Rous Peter, earned the nickname Peter Pandya from the locals for his lavish native lifestyle, his ability to ride elephants and shoot tiger, and his devotion to Minakshi (to whom he gave gifts which are still in the possession of the temple, allegedly for saving his life when a storm wrecked his house). The British were a little more robust about going native, at least in the East India Company days. Peter was remembered as a good chap and elicited admiring comments from the sober author of the local gazetteer a generation later.
It would be pleasing to think Sikander had gone down the same path. But the tradition told today by Muslim pilgrims at Tirupparakunram is somewhat different. To them Sikander was no sybarite or unbeleliever but a pious and saintly king who was martyred together with his faithful vizier and a handful of loyal soldiers surrounded by the Hindu army. His followers’ tombs are pointed out halfway up the hill; his own, on top, is supposed to be on the spot where he fell.
But Tirupparakunram’s pre-eminent shrine is of Murugan; it is one of his six abodes and is mentioned in some of the earliest Tamil poetry from the first centuries of our era. This was the goal of our visit: we met up back at the hostel at six and took tea in the lane before making our way to the shrine entrance. The fairy lights on the gopura were still on in the half-light, with the dramatic backdrop of the great rock; at the entrance, the temple servants were washing the steps.
‘This is one of the six abodes of Lord Murugan,’ announced Mr Ramasamy. ‘The legend commemorates the marriage of Murugan to his main wife, Deivani, daughter of Indra. Because of this story, at the auspicious time in early February, thousands of couples come here to solemnize their marriage or to be blessed. Incidentally, as Murugan has a second wife, the wild gypsy huntress Valli, there is also a little shrine dedicated to her on top of the hill, so that she is not left out.’ In the summer, he added, vast crowds attend Lord Murugan’s birthday. ‘Then you will see all sorts of strange happenings: people fire-walking on hot coals, piercing of the body with metal spears and locks through the mouth, people pulling carts hooked to the back.’ He pulled a face. ‘They are all getting a little carried away.’
The main temple is at the bottom, where a town has grown up since the Muslim occupation in the fourteenth century. It is spectacular. Because the sacred core was an eighth-century rock sanctuary a hundred feet above the street, the medieval builders constructed a series of massive terraces to incorporate the ancient features, and you climb through a series of grandiose halls to reach the sanctum.
We entered through a columned hall about forty yards square, supported by a forest of carved pillars. To the left are pilgrims’ stalls, offices and other temple buildings leading to a smaller tank; to the right are further storehouses, including the elephant shed, where the elephant was getting a vigorous scrub from two servants who stood on him, wielding long, hard-bristled floor brushes. The elephant looked up with a beady eye, wriggling with pleasure, as a first rush of early pilgrims came in. While the elephant and I scrutinized each other, Mala hurried over to the office to check with someone from the temple committee that, as a non-Hindu, I would be allowed to go right up to the sanctum. There was no problem: Murugan temples are usually open to all, including untouchables. Most Saivite shrines in the south are also generally welcoming to the respectful visitor, except in big places like Kanchi and Madurai which are on the tourist track. In my experience it is the more orthodox and ‘Sanskritic’ Vaishnavaite temples which invariably refuse entrance to outsiders.
We walked on through the hall. This main mandapa was used as a field hospital by the British when they took the place over in the 1760s, when once more the temple suffered seriously under foreign occupation. It was, said a British observer of the time, ‘the most beautiful rest-house I have ever seen… all hewn of stone with a roof supported upon a number of splendid pillars covered with carved figures… lofty, wide and long’.
At the far end you go under the main gopura and up curving stairs on to the second level and then up two more flights of steps on to the third, where there are a number of shrines. You then climb more stairs on to a fourth level, which leads to the sanctum itself. This is actually built around a series of rock-cut caves dating from the late seventh or the eighth century: at the back of the sanctum are carved panels, black with the constant burning of oil-lamps.
We were among the first people in the central shrine after the temple opened at 6.30. At the sanctum they were getting ready for the first pujas and a very helpful priest explained the rituals: ‘here we only do the libation on the lance of Murugan’ (i.e. the ritual libation); he washed the lance and, after a prayer, placed it on Murugan’s lap. Mr Ramasamy and several of the group including his wife and daughter were with us, and the priest waved us round the rail and into the area of the old sanctum itself, so that we could inspect the carvings close up, including a splendid Siva doing the cosmic dance, watched by Parvati and Nandi. In the main cave facing the entrance were Murugan and Ganesh at the two ends, and the goddess in pride of place in the middle. Below the shrine was a warren of subsidiary caves and long dark passages full of eighth-century carvings which included Murugan on his peacock: all in all one of the most remarkable collections of Pallava sculpture to survive.
He pointed out the line dividing the original rock-cut part from the later additions. For my benefit the priest explained the tale of Murugan’s marriages; everyone chipped in. Mr Ramasamy was a devotee of Murugan; this, after all, was a Murugan pilgrimage including his three major abodes. Mr Ramasamy became animated as he told the story: again the reference to Murugan as the God of the Tamils. Mr Ramasamy speaks of him and the family as if they were rather elevated neighbours, or better still movie stars, the kind of people whose lives and houses are shown off in the Indian equivalent of Hello! magazine, people whose peccadilloes were rather engaging and a constant fund of gossip. Murugan himself was clearly a bit of a lad: ‘This was his first wife, major wife. The second wife Valli was a gypsy; he could go running off to her in the hills.’ He snorted. “This is the prerogative of the god.’ He grinned and rolled his eyes.
‘But why is Murugan a child, Mr Ramasamy?’
‘God can be father or mother. Or a child. When god is a child, the devotee is like a parent and his worship nourishes the child. In return the child gives the devotee joys which a parent has from children.’.
The priest chipped in: ‘This way too the devotee is helped to see himself as a child: to develop childlike skills, playfulness. A child at play is centre of attention, centre of life, worthy of devotion. You see, Tamil people adore children.’
After darshan in the sanctum the priest tidied up. ‘We were occupied by the British. There was a hospital here two hundred years ago. A certain Major Hewitt told his superiors he did not use force against this place, but he did, and a priest committed self-immolation in protest. This was not the action of a British officer and gentleman. Where are you from? London: I have a cousin in Acton.’ Then while Mala and Mrs Vaideyen went for breakfast I headed up the hill path by the temple.
From the top by Sikander Shah’s tomb the plain is spread out before you. It is a lovely spot: some trees in rocky gullies shading a spring, and gnarled and bent umbrella trees bracing themselves against the winds which sweep across the top. On the summit is the tomb chamber and a little mosque with standard fifteenth-century Hindu-type monolithic columns with flowery patterns and brackets. The mosque was added later; it has a domed pavilion on top and a little wooden-roofed colonnade of carved stone columns, again of standard south-Indian type. Probably the tomb was expanded a few decades after Sikander’s death when the Hindu rulers no longer saw Muslims as a threat, and the memory of the terrible attacks of the 1300s had gone. Now a shrine, it is one of the most revered Muslim sites in the region, but you will often see Hindus who have made the climb going in to pay their respects.
The hill of Tirupparakunram is just one of a series of dramatic granite outcrops which fringe the plain of Madurai like enormous boulders left over by some ancient age of fire or ice: Elephant Hill, Snake Hills and so on. In the early morning haze their weird shapes fringe the horizon of the plain like petrified monsters. They are graphically described in one of the first British accounts of the region in 1868. At that time most had never been climbed or visited by outsiders. James Nelson of the Madras Civil Service describes Snake Hills:
They are wild and uncultivated, covered with rocks of all sizes, from stupendous blocks of naked granite down to boulders and stones, and of the roughest and strangest shapes. Only the scantiest vegetation clothes their slopes: thorns and stunted trees alone form their jungles. No wealth of any kind is extracted from their summits and scarcely a pagoda has been built upon them; so that neither the natives who live in their neighbourhood, nor the officers who collect revenues from those natives, are often tempted to climb their gaunt and burnt-up sides.
In the early morning after a little night rain the sky was clear and the air fresh and, apart from a gentle haze over the city, you could see all the way from Tirupparakunram across to the Alagar Hills. The whole of the Vaigai plain stretches out like a natural theatre, widening out into the blue haze in the direction of the sea, fifty miles or so to the east. This was the heartland of Pandya civilization, the southernmost of the three great historical zones of Tamil Nadu, the sacred landscape which animates the temple myths of the Pandyan land. Looking from the top of Tirupparakunram, modern suburbs stretch out across the plain on both sides of the Vaigai river, and in the centre, visible despite the early morning haze, are the four main gopuras of the Great Temple of Minakshi, which lies at the heart of one of the oldest and most famous cities in the whole of south Asia: Madurai.
We headed in along the long straight road from Tirupparakunram and soon hit the teeming streets of Madurai. Home to a million people, the second city of Tamil Nadu after Madras, it is a thriving commercial city, famous for its textile mills and transport workshops, and has a very busy shopping centre. The streets were blocked with lorries, cycle rickshaws and bullock carts. Auto-rickshaws buzzed like angry hornets. Marco Polo spent two months here in 1273, not long before the Muslim sack, and called it ‘the most noble and splendid province in the world’. Polo got hot under the. collar about the scantily clad women, for it was the custom for women to go bare-breasted, as it was even recently on the nearby Malabar coast. Today the city is as famous as in the Venetian’s day for its commerce and in particular for its quick-witted street sellers and rickshaw-men, who are proverbially out to con the unsuspecting strangers and country folk, who pour in in their thousands every day to do pilgrimage to the goddess of the ‘fish eyes’.
The bus slowed down to walking pace behind a ruck of bullock carts. ‘Mr Michael, be very careful with your money here,’ said Mr Ramasamy with a concerned look. ‘People here are out to bamboozle you. Not as bad as Delhi, but this is the reputation of Madurai; watch your purse. Don’t be persuaded to buy things; they will have the very shirt off your back.’
Madurai is booming these days. New buildings are going up everywhere. The entire place is being rebuilt in concrete, with a profusion of new hotels near the station, but the modern city is shaped by the ancient. The streets form a series of concentric circles around the temple, a layout which has always determined the city’s topography and which probably goes back at least to the first centuries AD. The inner streets are named after the Tamil months and were part of the ritual layout of the city from its earliest days; this is planning as laid down in die religious texts for the sacred city, the cosmic city. It is an ancient idea you can see in ruins at Teotihuacan in Mexico or as a museum in the Forbidden City, but here it is still living.
Madurai in fact is one of India’s oldest cities, mentioned in Indian and Greek texts from the fourth century BC onwards. From the first century BC, when Greek navigators discovered the secrets of the monsoon, their merchants could sail regular return journeys every year to trade in spices; soon they started to settle in Madurai. In Tamil sources the Greeks here are described as mercenaries living in some sort of colony. Epic poems refer to the Yavanas – the Greeks – walking the streets gawping like tourists. There are even tantalizing references to Greek sculptors working here. Hoards of Roman coins have been picked up in the city and across Tamil Nadu, proof of commercial links with the Roman empire, and these are detailed in one of the most fascinating documents to survive from the ancient world, the Alexandrian merchants’ manual known as the ‘Periplus of the Erythraean Sea’.
Following leads from the ‘Periplus’, Mortimer Wheeler excavated in a creek near Pondicherry on the eve of the Second World War, and uncovered the Roman warehouses of Arikamedu crammed with Aretine wine for the Tamil middle classes (a first-century consumer boom?). In Augustus’ day a Pandyan embassy went from Madurai to Rome, and soon enough a temple to the emperor was erected on the Kerala coast at Cranganore. (Victoria was not the first Western ruler to have her statue set up in an Indian garden.) The biggest demand on the part of Western consumers was for spices. If we are to believe the geographer Strabo, in his day the Roman balance of payments ran deeply into the red to fill the pepper barns by the Tiber’. And even today some of our words for spices – pepper and ginger, for example – are loan words from Tamil which came into Western speech via Greek.
The cultural pre-eminence of Madurai dates from this period. Tradition holds that the city was the centre of the Sangam, or academy, of Tamil poets. In Tamil literature there are, in fact, legends of still earlier, antediluvian sangams, but the one in the Roman period is real enough. A famous Sangam poem, ‘The Garland of Madurai’, paints a brilliant image of the city in the days of the second-century Pandya king Nedunjeliyan when, it was said, the perfume of flowers, ghee and incense from the city could be smelt from miles away: ‘a city gay with flags, waving over homes and shops selling food and drink; the streets are broad rivers of people, folk of every race, buying and selling in the bazaars, or singing to the music of wandering bands and musicians’. The poem describes the stalls round the temple, ‘selling sweet cakes, garlands of flowers, scented powder and betel pan’, and the craftsmen working in their shops, ‘men making bangles of conch shell, goldsmiths, cloth dealers, tailors making up clothes, coppersmiths, flower-sellers, vendors of sandalwood, painters and weavers’. All this could be today’s city, and indeed Madurai has known an amazing continuity from that day to this; the Pandyan dynasty had its ups and downs, but a distant scion of the dynasty ruling in Strabo’s day was still ruling when the British Raj took over in 1805.
We parked by the north gate and walked round to the east entrance usually used by pilgrims. Here custom dictates you enter not under the gopura but through the goddess’s mandapa, the hall where the eight attributes of the goddess are represented. Where Chidambaram is the god’s house, this emphatically is the domain of the goddess. The road outside is crammed with shops and stalls hung with decorative canopies. Here at festival time the streets are closed to traffic and you cannot move for stalls selling clothes, shoes, tools, utensils, tiffin boxes, toys, cakes, scaly-skinned jak fruit. Right by the entrance are tea shops with old brass samovars where they boil up the first brew at four, just as the temple is opening. Behind the shops is one of four big covered stalls where the thousands of visitors leave their shoes before entering the shrine.
Before you go in, just opposite the entrance, there is a grand mandapa built as a choultry for pilgrims between 1626 and 1633 by Tirumala Nayak, the great builder of early modern Madurai; beyond the temple are the remains of his Nayak palace, constructed in a showy Saracen Gothic. He also built the huge festival tank outside the old city walls. But the mandapa is perhaps his most magnificent, and certainly his most tasteful piece of work: 333 feet long and over 100 feet wide, it has four rows of elaborately sculpted monolithic pillars supporting a flat roof of huge granite slabs; in the central aisle are portraits of the dynasty. A haunting series of glass-plate photographs – now in the India Office library in London – taken in the 1850s by Captain Edward Lyons, shows this wonderful building at the time of the Indian Mutiny, unencumbered, its floor an undulating expanse of polished flagstones. But for a century now the building has been leased to tailors and the place is packed with stalls, shops, workshops and booths heaped with bales of cloth, curtained with figured drapes. Walk through here any time of day and you will be besieged by importunate seamsters offering to run up a suit for you by the end of the day – or sooner. It can be a struggle to stay clothed.
‘Hello, sir. Kindly tell me what is your native place? You are from which country? England? Very nice. I have many English friends. Do you know Hull? I am a tailor, sir.’ (Hands card.) ‘Seven generations of my family are tailors here by the East Gate. Come into my shop. Sit; sit and have some tea. No obligation to buy. Just look.’
He stared at my shirt.
‘This is a very old shirt.’
‘Actually it’s a very new shirt. I got it as a Diwali present. But it has only taken the dhobi in Chidambaram one wash to beat the life out of it and break all the buttons. I think the dhobis and the tailors must be in cahoots.’
He laughed. ‘Dhobis are tailors’ best friend, sir. But you are most definitely needing a new shirt. If you will take off your shirt here and now, I will measure and copy it by five clock. Exact. I will make two: one white, one blue. Best Kanchi silk. No? You don’t want shirt? Look, your trousers have ripped. These I can remake.’ (Takes tape measure from round neck and threatens inside leg measurement.) ‘What time does your tour bus leave? I will bring them to your hotel. Take them off straight away! Take them off please!’
‘I’m sorry. I’m going to the temple now to do puja. I can hardly visit the goddess with no trousers.’
‘All right then, what about a sari for your wife?’
‘This is not my wife.’
‘No problem, sir. Still you can take a present for your wife too. Maybe you want to change dollars? Very good rate. Better than Indian State Bank. Pounds? Deutschmarks?’
As he ran after me his voice dropped to a hissed whisper: ‘You want some nice Kerala grass?’
Above you smile voluptuous, life-sized, stone goddesses adorned in real saris, rouged in vermilion, cooled in sandal. Below, the aisles chatter and rattle all day and half the night with the sound of treadle sewing-machines.
Leaving the mandapa and coming back to the east entrance, the one traditionally used by pilgrims, we plunged down the steps into the goddess’s entrance hall. It has an arched roof supported at the sides by double rows of columns on stone platforms above the pavement. The front rows have carvings of the eight attributes of the goddess; these are life-sized granite caryatids with powerful shoulders, muscular breasts, elaborate suspenders and freshly vermilioned foreheads. Above is a clerestory of painted stucco figures; the ceiling is gaily painted with flower designs enclosing five yantras, ornamental mandalas peculiar to the goddess. At the inner end are stone statues of Ganesh and Murugan, the children of the goddess whose house we are about to enter. Tied up framing the entrance were fat stems of banana plants, sagging under tumescent bunches of green fruit: everywhere images of fecundity.
The entrance literally seethed with life. Set back behind the columns were brightly lit stalls selling all the usual offerings for puja. Through it you come into what is almost a town within a town, for the outer halls of the temple are given over entirely to commerce. Even if you have seen it all before on the Tamil pilgrim trail, as I had, still the pilgrim stalls of Madurai come as a staggering spectacle: you pass through caverns of bangles in coloured glass, plastic and cheap gilt and walk down arcades of gaudy religious pictures, showing gods and goddesses of every faith, and some unheard of. Airbrushed eyes follow you round under cascades of travel bags, peacock feathers, clockwork birds and fluffy toys. There are trays of conch shells, emeralds, beads, sandal bars. There are heaps of the most dazzlingly intense scarlet, saffron and purple powders (on one table alone I counted a dozen dizzying shades of crimson). In the central colonnades are twenty or thirty flower stalls piled with beds of cut flowers, and hung with garlands as tall as a man, kaleidoscopes of cut blooms individually strung and bound to make adornments fit for the necks of politicians or gods. Around them the floor was littered with leaves, discarded blooms, broken coconuts; the air was drenched with the perfume of jasmine and incense. Finally, at the central crossing, you stop under four vast bracketed piers, and stand rubbing your eyes trying to take it all in, while the crowd jostles past you into the interior. Then you feel a soft moist breath tousling your hair and look up to see two temple elephants standing benignly over you, bright yellow yantras of wet sandal on their foreheads. Shifting gently from foot to foot they receive the pilgrims and their proffered rupees amid a cacophony of noise, chatter, laughter and music, while sudden flurries of drumming and squeals of trumpets echo in the depths of the interior. And we had yet to set foot inside.
Mala came over to pull me away from the pictures and brusquely handed back to the stallholder the one I was about to buy, a silver-framed trio of lissom young goddesses sitting lotus fashion in red saris in a crimson-draped boudoir. (By now I confess, I was becoming irresistibly hooked on the most tawdry superficialities of Hinduism.)
‘It’s really nice, don’t you think?’ I said hopefully. It cut no ice with Mala. ‘He is charging too much. Twenty-five rupees is too costly. Now we are going in. Put it down and come.’
I protested feebly and then did as I was told. A few days on the road and we were beginning to behave like a married couple.
In Madurai, contrary to the usual custom, the goddess is always worshipped before the god. As far as the pilgrims are concerned, this is her temple, not his. And so, offering baskets in hand, Mala and Mrs Vaideyen led the way past the Ganesh shrine which stands in a lovely little garden opposite the elephant house. The paving-stones were damp after their early morning wash; a kolam on the floor, fresh marigolds on a cluster of lingas and snake stones under the vanni tree. In the garden a group of pilgrims were reading religious texts aloud with their guru. In the early morning light under a clear blue sky the temple looked simply lovely.
From everywhere you can see the gopuras. These form the distinctive skyline of the city. Madurai city laws forbid building higher, as also does old Tamil popular belief. ‘Building higher than the temple gopura is a proverbial description of hubris. That day the west and south towers were covered with scaffolding, wooden poles and wicker cladding – undergoing a major renovation, the first in thirty years, to restore and repaint the sculptures on the towers. There are no fewer than 1500 sculptures on the south tower, and the west and east towers have over a thousand each. Now faded to a pleasant pastel shade, they are to be restored to a garish Hindu Disneyland, as we could glimpse from the glaring tangerines, greens and kingfisher blues under the rattan screens.
Here the Tamil gopura reaches its apotheosis, sweeping up in elegant parabolic curves covered with sculpture from top to bottom. There is none of the restraint of Chidambaram, with its sedate measured rows of dignified deities; here they are swarming with demons, gods, goddesses, monsters, animal-headed creatures, figures of myth, fantasies, dreams, nightmares, wriggling, prancing, dancing – giving the impression of a myriad life forms. Energy itself shooting up into the sky. Here you think that if Zen is about the distilled essence of life, Hinduism is about its amazing and infinite variety. Or, as Edward Lear put it when he came here in 1874, ‘its myriadism of impossible picturesqueness’.
It is not everyone’s cup of tea, it must be said. Though an artist like Lear could describe the Dravidian temples as ‘stupendous and beyond belief, this architecture was disparaged by the architectural historian Ferguson, who raged at its barbarity, finding it all a prodigious wasted effort, and to make matters worse, ‘all for a debased fetishism’. He thought nothing here aspired to ‘the lofty aims of the best works of the Western world’, and reserved his most scathing comments for the design of the gopuras: ‘As an artistic design nothing could be worse,’ he thundered. ‘The bathos of the gopuras decreasing in size and elaboration as they approach the sanctuary is a mistake which nothing can redeem; it is altogether detestable.’ As for the idea that ‘the altar or statue of the god should be placed in a dark cubical cell wholly without ornament’ – well, that left him finally speechless. ‘If only the principle could be reversed,’ he burbled, ‘such buildings would be among the finest in India.’ Which only goes to show how even the best scholars can utterly fail to escape the preconceptions of their own time and culture, and, what is worse, fail completely to divine the purpose of the architects who made these great buildings.
The temple forms a rectangle about 850 × 750 feet on its longest sides, so it is by no means the largest of southern shrines, but inside this is the final baroque flowering of the Dravidian style we saw in an earlier phase at Chidambaram, and whose origins lie in the seventh-century shore temple at Mahabalipuram and the early shrines at Kanchi. Inside you enter a labyrinth of corridors around the shrines, monolithic sculpted granite columns thirty feet high, with huge stepped overhanging brackets to carry the roof, many of the columns highly sculpted into the form of monsters and capped with the snapping heads of mythical beasts. Leading off the corridors are many sub-shrines, including the thousand-pillared hall built in 1572, which is no longer used for worship now. About 250 feet square, it has 985 granite pillars brilliantly carved with mythological figures. A wide central nave leads to a shrine of the dancing Siva, with vistas down the full length of the hall. At the far end a large bronze Nataraja is now inappropriately backlit with Hammer House of Horror red gels.
In front of the main shrines the corridors open out into pillared vestibules in the ‘baroque’ style of the Nayaks. Most impressive is the Kambattadi mandapa, a vast shadowy arcade in front of the entrance to the Siva shrine. Lit by dazzling shafts of light from the roof, this space has the baroque magnificence of the contemporary Bernini. But where the Italian master constructs floods of light with gold, paint and sunbursts of gilded wood, here the astounding elaboration of the carving (and in such a hard stone) is coupled with a sensual energy which positively bursts out over the iron rails. Such was the last flowering of the Pandyan tradition. Though in fact only erected in the early seventeenth century, it actually looks as one might imagine the House of Atreus had it never fallen; smelling of hoary antiquity and glistening with vermilion and the oil of sacrifice.
Originally, the mandapa was lit only by artificial light – the light wells, like the neon strips, are modern – and you passed this lamp-lit zone before plunging down the axis to the silvery chamber of Siva, whose starry lamps flicker deep in the interior. In few architectures has the world of the spirits been made so concrete. In front of you, rearing up behind iron rails, are the twenty-four forms of Siva carved in the round on the sides of eight huge pillars around a tall gilded flagstaff which rises through the roof. Among these is the marriage of Siva and Minakshi–Parvati, which is still celebrated every year. Between them, facing Siva’s sanctum, is his faithful bull Nandi, a stone monolith which is usually covered in heaps of darba grass and a snowfall of salt offerings.
This colossal arrangement is faced by another group of four monolithic granite statues each over ten feet high, and each a masterpiece of the stonecarver’s art. There is Siva in his fiery ‘terrifying’ and ‘non-terrifying’ forms, the urdhva tandava (the impassioned dance), and also Bhadrakali, the ever-present black incarnation of the goddess. These statues are the object of much veneration for today’s pilgrims, and in front of them there is always an attendant seated at a little table with a large tin bowl containing lumps of ghee floating in water (to stop it melting in the heat). These the. pilgrims buy for a few paise and throw at the statues for good luck; it is an ancient custom but no one could enlighten me about its origins. By mid-morning the figures are spattered head to foot with yellow ghee, which is scraped off every hour or two by temple servants on ladders.
The mandapa creates a tremendous brooding impression: the dim light, the giant statues, the lamps and puja fires, the glint of brass and silver, the shafts of sunlight coming down from the light wells, not to mention the noise and the smell – an impression quite overwhelming to earlier generations of visitors, who rather like Forster’s Miss Quested entering the Marabar Caves, found it all ‘frightening’ and ‘incomprehensible to the Western mind’. Hinduism here was ‘a religion without possibility of salvation’. Francis Yeats Brown, a well-known thirties Indophile, could not bring himself to enter (‘I was afraid’). ‘Here one may see the very essence of Dravidian idolatry,’ wrote one old British hand in the twenties, admitting nevertheless that ‘the whole effect upon the mind of this majestic hall is powerful and strange in the extreme’.
It is easy to sit for hours here and watch the world go by, the ebb and flow of visitors, the ritual cycle of the temple’s day. Or to wander the corridors and subsidiary shrines; outside the door of the Siva shrine, for example, is a little group of altars to the planets; oil-lamps burn from dawn till night dripping fire on to the stones, and pilgrims are constantly moving past them. At a huge, pot-bellied Ganesh devotees leave sticky sweets and pray for good luck. There are shrines to the legendary Sangam poets; there is even the preserved trunk of the kadamba tree where the temple was founded in mythic times (rather as in classical Greek times the stump of Athena’s olive was preserved along with her archaic statue in the Erechtheion at Athens). And all through these spaces lamps burn and pilgrims congregate, mill around, pray and perform their own intimate rituals with a bewildering variety of gesture and movement. Tapping the forehead with the knuckles, smacking cheeks in a kind of chastisement, holding the hands above the head, pirouetting, bowing, prostrating: the halls echoing all day with the susurration of a thousand private prayers.
But we had no time to wander. Mr Ramasamy’s timetable admitted no slack: our Darshan Video Bus tour had to get to Palani by early evening, so for us it was straight to the goddess. Mala led the way, through the inner gates, framed by a huge metal arch holding a thousand oil-lamps, which are lit at festival time, so that the pilgrim passes through a gateway of fire. We walked past the lotus tank, along a spacious and airy sunlit arcade to the Kili Kudumandapa which lies outside the goddess’s shrine, a space with an elaborately painted roof supported by rows of pillars carved with roaring lion-like creatures with their tails in their mouths. Outside the door is a Nandi and a big painted kolam on the floor like an intricate geometrical pattern, and a circular lotus mandala in a square frame inlaid in the floor; here many devotees prostrate themselves before going in. To one side is a row of shrines with parrot cages. (Goddesses in the south are often shown with parrots, but the parrot is Minakshi’s particular emblem: they are held to signify peace and happiness. Until fairly recently the temple kept real parrots, which were taught to speak the deity’s name: this was discontinued, according to Mr Ramasamy, because of ‘maintenance problems’.) Above the door there is a big illuminated sign identifying this as the goddess’s domain, and only Hindus may go beyond the threshold. Mala explained my presence to the guardian on the door and after some discussion with my fellow travellers I was allowed through.
*
When you go through the door the echoing sounds of the exterior world are left behind, daylight lost. You have moved literally and figuratively to an inner world, the antithesis of all that lies outside the door: peace. Where Rameshwaram was riotous noise and confusion, the atmosphere here was quite different, and for this obviously the pilgrims were responsible. There was a warm hush of expectation, a suspension of reality and the projection instead of a land of dreams. You go under an early-thirteenth-century gateway into a large chamber lined by a double row of columns, with brackets holding up the stone slabs of the roof. This is the outer of two enclosures which surround the goddess’s sanctum; it is a spacious columned walkway circling the inner shrine, allowing circulation of air in the stifling interior. In front is the gilt and brass flagstaff of the goddess, where her long linen flag is raised at festival time; on either side of the stairs up into the inner area are shrines to Ganesh and Murugan, the two sons of Siva by the goddess, emphasizing that Minakshi is another form of Parvati. On the inner wall to the left you see a group of plaster images of the temple’s great benefactor the Nayak king Tirumala Nayak and his two queens, in painted stucco, sensuous and pot-bellied; he was a patron of gunpowder and sandal, sponsor of dancing girls and gladiators, protagonist of the beautiful but violent world which was seventeenth-century Tamil Nadu on the eve of the European invasion.
We circled the corridor and then, coming back to the front, entered the inner enclosure, up the front stairs, through a door flanked by two copper gatekeepers. You step into a darkened inner chamber built in the fifteenth century, in which the goddess chamber stands. This is the most atmospheric part of the temple, despite the neon strip lights. In front of the goddess’s shrine the roof is held up by forty granite columns which are covered with chased copper. The room is lit only by artificial light, and the effect is very striking, fire glittering on surfaces of metal – especially when the temple is open at night for special pujas, on eclipses, and full moons. Counting inwards from the old walls you have now passed through four concentric rings of processional streets, and four rectangular enclosures within the temple: in other words, a kind of huge man-made mandala, a vestige of the ancient city planners.
Now we were in the heart of the labyrinth. In front of us was a stone chamber fifty feet long by twenty-five wide, ‘the womb chamber’ in whose rear part the immovable image of the goddess is fixed. The sanctum, which only the priests may enter, is raised by three steps above the floor of the inner court. The pilgrims wait below the steps on either side of the rail, the nearest fifty feet or so from the image. The goddess stands in a narrow corridor of darkness, lit by hanging oil-lamps, and by a ring of lamps behind a horn aureole on the back wall like a circle of stars, creating the strange effect of limitless space in the darkness behind the image. Only when the priests do puja and hold fire before her is her face dimly lit in the flickering flames.
In the womb chamber the pilgrims come face to face with the image which is their goal. It is a human image, much more personalized and specific than the aniconic linga. Here the transaction is with another person, albeit divine. This is what we in the West call idol worship. Better though to quarry its original meaning in the Greek: eidolon means ‘something seen’, whether concrete or phantasmal, and hence a material image which evokes a shared imaginal world in the minds of those who see.
The image of the goddess is a little smaller than lifesize, her skin of green stone (emerald according to more than one pilgrim I spoke to, but probably green porphyry mined in the hills north of the city). She stands in contrapposto, right leg slightly bent at the knee so that the left hip is accentuated, emphasizing her procreative powers. She is crowned, and though the statue as carved is clothed – as are the bronzes – she is always dressed in a real robe too. Her costume changes each day; she wears a white sari at night to symbolize the retention of her sexual powers, and red during the day, signifying blood, the colour of female potency, so that she is charged with the aura of sex and fecundity. In one festival in particular, Navaratri, different symbolic meanings are expressed by costume shifts and liturgies on each of the nine days. She holds a parrot and a bouquet, ‘radiating love and compassion’ as the local guidebook for pilgrims puts it.
At the rail Mr Ramasamy, Mrs Vaideyen and Mala lean forward, craning to see; Mala strikes her cheeks, right with left hand, left with right. As the Brahmin comes along the rail with the tray bearing camphor names and ash, she drops a few paise on to the tray in return for ash and daubs her forehead with it. (The scented whitish ash which comes from the camphor flame is the colour of the god; the vermilion dot seen on Indian women’s foreheads the world over is the colour of the goddess.) Then she resumes her fixed concentration on the image and completes her prayer. There was a kind of urgency to the action, especially a pressing need to see the face – virtus comes from the face and specifically from the eyes. Darshan, the act of worship, means ‘seeing’.
There was a hush as they stared into the black chamber: the nickering flames of the puja lamps caused the air to quiver in the hot airless room; a smell of sweat and incense; stillness. As the atmosphere seemed to vibrate in front of my eyes, I had the uncanny sense that the statue was moving; it was as if the pilgrims’ love had infused the image with life.
(‘Senses stilled and indrawn,’ says the famous Tamil poem by Tirumullar, which is known to all the pilgrims. ‘Surrender to the Beloved is as when a man and a woman lie together in embrace and loving caress. When that becomes this then you will find peace and bliss.’ Having nothing from my own culture with which to compare, at that moment I found” myself thinking of the strange story of The Winter’s Tale, in which, in a mysterious lamplit shrine, the statue of a mother is brought back to life by the faith of her lost daughter and her grieving husband. How very Indian, Shakespeare’s strange puja in that late romance.)
The Madurai temple legend according to Mala is this: Minakshi, the daughter of the Pandyan king, is born deformed, with three nipples. She is told that when she sees her future husband the blemish will be removed. She becomes queen of the Pandyas, but she is an Amazonian, wielding spear, bow and chariot, conquering her male enemies; ruling and acting as a man. Then, on Kailash, as promised, she has a vision of Siva and is restored. In fact she is none other than an incarnation of Parvati, the embodiment of auspiciousness within marriage. She returns to Madurai to dwell in the temple and hears the appeals of the childless and blesses their future offspring. Married into the Brahminical pantheon, but a Dravidian warrior queen, she retains a strange status, which is summed up in her role in the temple. She has primacy in the cult, she is worshipped first, before the male god and stands apart from him. Having been self-created in the sacrificial fire, she passes from being the Amazonian three-breasted queen who led armies and ruled as a man, to being the epitome of domesticated femininity, married and a mother. But she is none the less the independent mistress of the shrine. Her role in the year’s festivals reminds the pilgrims of her more dangerous side; and she always stands alone to receive her pilgrims, not as an appendage of the male god. Mr Ramasamy had something to say about this.
‘We have a saying in Tamil Nadu,’ said Mr Ramasamy; ‘In a marriage you either have a Madurai house or a Chidambaram house.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘If it is a Madurai house, the lady is wearing the trousers.’
‘Which one do you have, Mr Ramasamy?’
‘Well, we live in Chidambaram, but reverence Minakshi. Ideal balance.’
Mrs Ramasamy raised her eyebrows with a twinkle.
When we left, big mirrors in the roof above the door enabled the pilgrims to see the goddess still above the crush, to glimpse her image behind them as they walked away. At the door Mala turned again, standing on tiptoe, to look one last time, saying goodbye. Like a child, or a lover.
On the way out near the door there is one last image at which the women pray: a simple crude stone relief carved on a column. It shows the goddess as the Earth Mother; it is an image prayed to especially by women hoping for children. Big-legged and round-bellied, she stands naked, legs akimbo, while her female essence is drunk from her yoni by a tiny male devotee; the whole pillar is smeared in kun kum, and glistens blood red in the semi-darkness. The Tamils believe the life juice is possessed in much greater quantity, and more potently, by women than men. Like the ancient Greeks, they think that women’s sexual power is much greater than men’s, and hence it is vital in seeking a partner in marriage that the horoscope shows the right balance of attributes. Preferably the man should be some years older than the woman, for in all things – age, personality, caste, physical attributes, sexual appetite and proclivity – a mismatch is destructive to the male. Visceral and unambiguous, this image is the very symbol of tantric religion, a literal representation of the force which through its long history India has assigned to Sakti.
I was fascinated by our encounter with the goddess. It felt like meeting someone once known but long forgotten. Aphrodite, Artemis, Athena, Demeter, Persephone, Nut, Isis, Ishtar. We know their names and attributes but we meet them only in the residue of their aura, in books, paintings, symbols, and in archaeological monuments. We try to trace her epiphanies in broken Greek majuscule at Eleusis, or on the starry zodiac of Dendera where her genitals and breasts have been gouged by Christian fanatics. We stand uncomprehendingly before the black-faced, gilded Diana in Naples, her neck hung with bulls’ testicles; we confront Ishtar’s haunting visage in Baghdad, she who knew ‘the rules of the underworld’. But to meet her living incarnation was, to say the least, exciting. Nowhere on earth as in India is the goddess worshipped in such splendour. There is an archaic, irrepressible current in Indian life which has never been done away with by the westernization or modernization of our own times.
We walked back outside into the blinding glare of the sun. By the tank, I talked to Mala while her neighbours, packed holy ash into their bags. Everyone was satisfied: it was as if they had taken food or drink. I pondered this as we ate that lunch time in the crowded Sree Ganesh mess: a dank subterranean place, friendly and overcrowded, which served the office population near the West Gate.
I asked the women about Minakshi’s eyes: Why does she have ‘fish eyes’? Beautiful women’s eyes are like a carp, they said, ‘long and shapely as a fish’. Also fishes’ eyes are round and unblinking, to look at they are liquid and glitter. (This is an ancient semantic cluster in Tamil, for the word min is the root of both fish and star; originally perhaps meaning to shine, it probably comes from the most archaic stratum of the language, for this combination of fish and star occurs on the pottery of the Indus civilization.) Someone also mentioned an old folk belief that fishes have the power to hatch their eggs by a mere look. Today in Tamil Nadu, they said, there are many popular stories about the fatal power of the glance: between men and women a glance is said to be almost as significant as the loss of chastity. Eyes, like sex ”organs, contain love: ‘Love at first sight,’ we say. Souls are said to mix through the eyes – to my mind a true insight into the overriding power of physical attraction in choosing a partner and falling in love.
Mala said that this is what should happen in an arranged marriage when you meet the prospective husband or wife. The horoscope may be right, but if you don’t have the feeling through the eyes, then you should seek elsewhere. Sarasu, for example, had been looking for two years now; some of her suitors had been perfectly compatible, but she had felt nothing looking into their eyes. One of her friends added the popular etymology of the word for husband in Tamil, kanauar, as lean, ‘eye’ and avar, ‘he’, that is, ‘the one to whom the eyes go’ or ‘are given’. The first sight of the potential wife or husband has the kind of resonance of darshan: a recognition, a powerful encounter involving the exchange of spiritual and sexual power (as real darshan is with the goddess). ‘You see,’ said Mrs Vaideyen, ‘when Sita and Rama meet and fall in love, Kampan says their eyes met and a shaft of love entered her which later expanded and spread into her whole being. He invaded her heart, she said.’
With its grandly conceived annual ritual cycle and its great festivals, with its simple daily round of pujas, music and sacramental meals, Madurai reminds you that very simple rituals, by their beauty and antiquity, have the power to satisfy everyone, not merely the gullible and the illiterate. It is a mnemonic of a culture: a focal point, a crossing place, as the tax inspector had said. Behind the so-called idol lies the mental image: an imaginal world and a whole culture. It is not only, or even chiefly, about belief, but about being Tamil. In Western culture, Isocrates thought the mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis the most important legacy of the Greeks, for such things connect both with the whole body of myth and with social belief as well. At Madurai I felt myself in presence of (as Quintilian said of the Greek gods) ‘things which never were but are always.’
‘Now you can see the hill, Mr Michael,’ said Mr Ramasamy, shouting from the front of the bus. I jerked awake; the afternoon heat on the bus had been stupefying. It was now five. We had bypassed the rock of Dindigul, through Virupakshi, and entered a great bowl of wooded hills cut by deep valleys ahead. Rising up on the left were the cloud-topped foothills of the Western Ghats, the great massif of the Kodaikanal hills. Mr Ramasamy was excited. The last goal of our pilgrimage was in sight. ‘There, there, see now. You see the hill? It is one of the most charming places in all of Tamil Nadu.’
We were at the edge of a great lake, the Vyapuri, looking across it towards the mouths of two big valleys separated by dramatic cliffs, their pale ochre crags boldly etched by the sinking sun. Framing the eastern side of this beautiful prospect rises the steep rocky hill of Palani, a perfect dome 450 feet high, not unlike the Acropolis of Athens. On top is the famous shrine of Murugan, squat and flat, with red and white striped outer walls and a small gopura on the west. Below it you could see the sacred way which winds round the base of the hill, lined with shrines and choultries, and the wide stone staircase which climbs up the hillside to the summit.
As dusk comes on lamps are lit all the way up these paths, giving the impression of a hill draped in a garland of fairy lights. The natural setting was indeed, as Mr Ramasamy had said, quite charming. More than that, though, the surrounding bowl of hills lent an added majesty to the mysterious shrine on the summit; it was not a place to be passed through, or casually stumbled upon, but must be deliberately sought out in its mountain lair. Celebrated two thousand years ago in Sangam poetry, it is another tap root of Tamil culture. In the evening light of a quiet October day, across the rich cultivated plain, the green rice fields, the groves of palms and the vast silent range, it was a memorable sight, and the spirits of everyone on the bus visibly lifted with anticipation.
Like Lourdes, Palani is an out-and-out pilgrimage town. The mile-long road from the station to the foot of the hill winds through the town, round temples and shops and food stalls. There are hostels, choultries and lodges for the thousands who come in each day for a short stay: these are owned by different temple bodies, caste associations from all over the south. I strolled into the Sri Venkateshwara lodge to use their bathroom; it was a vast barracks painted bright green, the front hung with banana leaves and palm fronds for the festival; the foyer was heavy with the smell of Mysore incense and disinfectant. The place was crowded and buzzing with excitement, officious managers, booking clerks, and catering officers rushing to and fro. The whole town seemed to be geared to servicing the shrine. As you neared the foot of the hill, the religious buildings crowded the road: washing places, cloakrooms, left-luggage halls, hostels. We parked near the bus stand:
‘Right. Right,’ said Mr Ramasamy. ‘Three hours; leaving at eight o’clock. Take tiffin before we leave.’
There are two main things for pilgrims to do here: first you walk round the hill on a path called the Giri-Veedhi, a mile-long sandy road dotted with shrines, stone images of the peacock and memorials set up to commemorate wealthy devotees; it is a pleasant walk in the evening under the spreading branches of kadamba trees, Indian oaks. Many bathe too in the sacred river, the Shanmuga. Then you climb the hill. At the big festivals, especially in May, hundreds of thousands do this, many carrying a yoke across their shoulders and pots of milk for lustration. Some, usually young men, go further in self-mortification, piercing their cheeks with a kind of mouth lock, using a little metal spear with Murugan’s leaf-shaped blade: apparently the same ritual as that uncovered by the archaeologists on the coast near Tiruchendur.
I left my shoes in the temple office cloakroom and started up the 659 steps. On the slopes there are little gardens fed by streams from a perennial spring and shrouded by creepers with mimosa, bougainvillea, white-flowering vines and peacocks. Large signs tell the visitor they are sponsored by the Indian State Bank, the Vijaya Bank, Dindigul, even the Catholic Syrian bank, Dindigul. In leafy glades you catch sight of lifesize tableaux of mythic stories: there are shops, too, for drinks and snacks. Along the path sit the poor and the sick, and the holy renouncers: a line of ash-smeared ascetics with white whiskers.
From the parapet opens out a view of the great Vyapuri tank, the causeway and the town with all its lights coming on. On top of the hill is an open forecourt where a big crowd had camped out in the balmy light, listening to religious music relayed through loudspeakers; fires were burning at an open-air altar. To the north, the great circle of mountain peaks shaded off one behind the other. Then the sun burst through the clouds, glinting orange on the lake and the flooded paddy over four hundred feet below, far from where we were, in the domain of Murugan, Lord of the Hills.
The queue for darshan was predictably long: I had taken the precaution of buying a special ticket at the bottom of hill for 10 rupees: to ‘save waiting’ I was told.
At the top I showed my ticket to a man with an official armband.
‘Please wait.’
‘How long?’
‘One or two hours, please.’
‘I thought this was a special ticket and I could go straight in.’
‘Ah, you need to buy twenty-five-rupee ticket.’
‘Fine. Here’s the extra fifteen.’
‘Sorry; refund not available; ten-rupee ticket is not valid to exchange. You must pay the total: twenty-five rupees.’ Seeing my face his expression softened. ‘It is very nice; you will be sitting very close to the lord.’
I sat right by the entrance to the inner sanctum, across which was drawn a black curtain embroidered with the characters OM. I could hardly see a thing in the smoky half-light. Then drums struck up, and the curtain was whipped smartly aside to reveal a doll-like figure in gold garments and scarlet underclothes, a gold cummerbund and a conical gold hat. His smile was decidedly jaunty, like that of Rajini Kanth in the movies. There was so much incense smoke that he appeared to be standing on a golden cloud. It was, I learned, just one of several costume changes Murugan has at different pujas (one, as a girl, is no longer done). We of the twenty-five-rupee tickets sat right in front while the hoi polloi behind the rails were ushered through cheering like a football crowd. When the curtain was drawn open, an old man next to me who had brought his ten-year-old grandson burst into tears. The atmosphere was one of unalloyed pleasure and joy, as if people were sitting in front of a fire which warmed them to their hearts. When puja was over, prasad was handed out for us to drink. As I sat for a few minutes watching this strangely lifelike little face in its smoky golden room, the fat man who had sat next to me taciturn for almost the whole bus journey turned to me with a look of deeply serious happiness: ‘India – best gods.’
Outside, the sun had set and crowds were promenading around the wide terrace which covers the summit around the shrine; music playing through the loudspeakers added to the holiday atmosphere. The ranges of mountains were now receding into the twilight; over the paddies the light was fading into a misty softness and plumes of smoke were hanging over the fields below.
‘You are from which country?’
He was in his thirties. Handsome face, square jaw, honest, open face, short, curly black hair, moustache, kind eyes: friendly but guarded.
‘I am Christian. My name is Salvin. Same as your archbishop.’
‘Salvin?’ I said, and had to think for a moment before I cottoned on: ‘Ah yes, Selwyn. Catholic, Syrian, C of E? Evangelical?’ I asked, trying to be heedful of the diversity of any Indian religion. Even with Christianity these days in India one has to be a little careful: as the Catholics turn against Syrians in Kerala; and Pentacostalists and Evangelicals against everybody everywhere.
‘Protestant.’
‘Ah, me too,’ I said, surprising myself.
He turned out to be a telecommunications engineer from Madurai working in Palani. ‘So you have seen Lord Murugan,’ he said pointing to the blobs of sandal paste on my shirt.
He told me the story of the idol in the Murugan shrine. According to legend it is made of the nine poisons: special herbal medicines amalgamated into a wax-like substance over a thousand years ago by a mysterious magician, a Siddha (the sect still exists by the way). His name was Bhoga; he disappeared into a cave under the hill, where he will reappear like Merlin at the end of the Kali Yuga, this declining aeon of ours whose end is now in Hindu terms imminent (i.e. in a mere few hundred thousand years).
‘So you’ve seen Lord Murugan here, Selwyn?’ I said, slightly surprised; he was Christian, after all.
‘Many times. I work here in Palani you see. Lord Murugan is the most popular of the Tamil gods,’ he continued, and then added: ‘I have great faith in Lord Jesus.’
How welcoming Indian religion is, I thought. Here naturally, Jesus is another Indian god. For Selwyn perhaps he is more efficacious than Murugan, personally he is more drawn to him; but to have faith in him was to deny neither the existence nor the power of Murugan. You can see them arm in arm on pilgrim posters and murals in Madras. Despite periods of persecution under the likes of Malik Kafur and Aurangzeb, Indians lack our ideological baggage from inquisitions and crusades; the point of view of the man and woman in the street is ecumenical. Selwyn in fact happily goes between the Catholic shrine at Velankanni, Murugan of Palani and Muslim Nagore. Perhaps, I reflected, Indian Christians and Muslims are in a sense Hindus too, in that whatever faith Indian people follow, their mode of worship remains Indian. It is an old adage: Hinduism is India and India is Hinduism. Best gods indeed!
Though he had never been out of the south, Selwyn was well read and widely informed about the world. He was also a real believer in Gandhi, the first I had met to hold firmly to Gandhi’s ideas on non-violence and the unity of all religions. These days young Hindus never speak of him, but for Selwyn Gandhi was still the key. Look at the events in South Africa, he said. Mandela’s success proved that Gandhi’s principle of non-violence was still valid. ‘He is the greatest man alive: he forgave his enemies, you see.’
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘Forty-four. And you?’
‘Thirty-four. You look younger. And I older. Look at my face. I look older than you, I think. This is living in a poor country.’ He smiled as if embarrassed. ‘You are married?’
‘Yes, I have two little daughters. You?’
‘I have been married for two years. My wife Sundari works in local government. She is Christian too. We do not yet have children.’ There was disappointment in his eyes. ‘We have little time together you see: I am six days a week in Palani, then one day in Madurai. At present we are saving, both working. I have applied for a transfer to Madurai, but not yet successfully; it is hard to live apart like this.’
Somewhere in the courtyard I could hear Mr Ramasamy calling us all together. I left Selwyn sitting on the parapet looking out to the mountains with songs still drifting from the loudspeakers. At the top of the steps a great crowd sat around the flaming altar while the temple elephant tapped tonsured children on the head; a couple from Coimbatore waved goodbye. We had reached the end of our pilgrimage and I think felt very heartily, as Mala would say. We had a group photo taken by a bank manager from Bangalore. ‘So you see, Mr Michael, this is the joy of pilgrimage: the companionship, the doing it together,’ said Mr Ramasamy, beaming: ‘Now I ask you this: would you have had so much fun if you had gone privately with a driver in an A/C Ambassador car?’
We took nine hours back to Chidambaram; it had all been a bit of a whirlwind, and it was over so quickly. I couldn’t sleep. Mr Subrahmaniam, the tax inspector, and I sat together. Now and then he interrupted the conversation to point out of the window to something quite invisible in the darkness, for all I knew miles away, but clearly to him vividly present, exerting a spiritual force field which could easily be felt on the bus. Passing the island of Sriringam, for instance, he told me the story of a secret garden there, many acres in extent, surrounded by high granite walls:
‘There only the flowers sacred to Ranganatha are grown. These are then plucked and woven into garlands by special celibate priests. No one else may ever enter that garden,’ he said. ‘Even those who carry the garlands must tie a cloth around the nose so that they may not accidentally smell the fragrance before it is offered up to the god.’
His eyes lit up. Mr Subrahmaniam, as I knew by now, had both a subtle grasp of the higher flights of abstract thought and a childlike love of spectacle and mystery; needless to say this appealed to me greatly. In the early hours as we nodded in the glow of the red night light, he became more reflective.
‘Pilgrimages like this take place at the time of great natural phenomena, full moons, eclipses, the ends and beginnings of the cycles of heaven. To be there on such occasions, you feel a part of it. Part of Nature. Part of human society, of civilization. This is what it means to belong to a tradition.
‘Now here this tradition has a very special quality. It is a memorizing tradition. And memorizing gives certain very important things: a tremendous command of the language; a refinement of expression; a vision of poetic imagery which has survived many centuries. And in this tradition, what are the things which are valued as great? Sound, meaning, images, landscape, myths and stories, but also values, attitudes to life and respect for tradition itself.
‘This is being lost now. This is true all over the world, of course; I know, as we read in our newspapers. Traditional societies are being replaced. Tamil Nadu, I am sure, is not peculiar in this, although I have never travelled beyond it. But Tamil Nadu had a very deep commitment to it, and it survived even to the end of the twentieth century. But now it is on the way out. I think the damage has been done now. Traditional scholars are no longer being trained in the old ways, only in Western method. Temples have lost individual traditions which went back nearly two thousand years. Also, a memorizing culture needs time and who these days has time; where in the next generation will there be young people who want to devote the time to learn all this? When it is lost you cannot get it back.’
‘But don’t the politicians say now they want to revive it?’
He smiled sadly. ‘Ah. But they no longer know what it is.’
Dawn came with smoky lilac mist around Sirkali. The bus arrived back at Chidambaram around five. The streets were still dark as we came up East Car Street and stopped by the Ganesh statue outside Minakshi’s aunt’s house. Mala and her neighbours did a quick prayer at the little locked grille where the oil-lamp was burning low. It was still dark as our tired band trooped home to prepare for work: Mr Subrahmaniam to the local tax office, Ganesh and Raja to the temple, Mr Ramasamy to school. He was looking ragged and unshaven.
‘So, back to school this morning then, Mr Ramasamy?’
‘Yes. Out of the frying-pan, Mr Michael. Good training, you see. Handling busload of pilgrims or class full of children. Same, same.’ He grinned.
‘So what next?’
‘We go to Tiruvannamalai next month: only one night, 110 rupees. But next year I am planning a big pilgrimage for Sivaratri festival: we will be going from Chidambaram to Kashi, Benares, in north India. And many other places: Haridwar, Rishikesh, Gaya, the Sangam at Allahabad. It will take two weeks: super-de-luxe bus, no hard seats like these, reclining chairs: cushioned seats.’
‘So you are not planning to renounce the world just yet?’
‘Ha! I am expanding. This will be the best yet: 2200 rupees, two meals daily included.’
‘What about accommodation?
‘No accommodation.’ He laughed. ‘This will be provided free by various adinams: Tirupannandal, Dharamapuram. They provide food and lodging at Benares in choultries for the Tamil pilgrims. Everyone makes only the donation he can afford.’
‘And movies too?’
‘A galaxy of stars. By next year maybe even Hollywood movies dubbed in Tamil. Spielberg! So get your booking in soon, Mr Michael. Book now to avoid disappointment!’