Jambukeswara and Mangalyeswarar temples near Trichy, the Brihadeshwarar temple near Thanjavur, the Airavateswarar, Nageswarar, and Adi Kumbeswaram temples at Tanjore, the Gangaikondcholapuram and Malakadambur temples en route to Chidambaram, and the Nataraja temple at Chidambaram.
For a transcript, see https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For pictures, see greatmirror.com
Jambukeswara and Mangalyeswarar temples near Trichy, the Brihadeshwarar temple near Thanjavur, the Airavateswarar, Nageswarar, and Adi Kumbeswaram temples at Tanjore, the Gangaikondcholapuram and Malakadambur temples en route to Chidambaram, and the Nataraja temple at Chidambaram.
For a transcript, see https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For pictures, see greatmirror.com
“What Did She Just Say? A Symbol of What?”
Let's assume for the moment that there are two ways to write about Hindu temples. The first is to focus on their extraordinarily complicated shapes. Doing this would be a lot easier with the right vocabulary, and The Encyclopedia ofIndian Temple Architecture comes to the rescue with an appendix listing about 300 terms, beginning with Adhahpadma, adhisthana, adital, and agramandapa. The first of them. adhahpadma, it defines as “minor cyma-recta moulding.” I didn't have a clue what that was, so I looked it up in a regular dictionary and found that cyma-reeta refers to a curve that is concave at the top and convex below. Things I never knew.
But describing shapes doesn't exhaust their study. I'm reminded of a French archaeologist working in India early in the last century and writing that “there is a difference between describing and studying.” Do you hear that Gallic sniff, that academic snootiness? Maybe I'm imagining it. In any case, by studying Indian temples, he meant working out their stylistic history. He restricted himself to South India and then to restrict himself further to three administrative districts covering only a sliver of that area. Even then, he had his hands full. And that's before we get to iconography, the sometimes difficult job of identifying the many divinities on temple walls.
But then there's the second approach. It sets aside shape and asks what these temples are for. Yes, we could stand at the entrance of a temple and ask people why they had come. They would probably say that they were here for a blessing from the temple deity, or, a little more specifically, to make an offering in the hope that the deity would give them something in return. This of course is a thread running through most religions. The Romans described it with the phrase Do ut Des. “I give so you give.” I may have done this myself. I have no recollection of sailing over my handlebars, but I do remember lying stunned and spreadeagled on the warm, blessedly soft asphalt. For a minute or so I lay there unable to move and muttering, over and over, “Jesus Christ.” I don't often use those words, and I still wonder why I used them at that moment. I'm thinking now that it qualifies at least marginally as a prayer.
Still, when I ask what Indian temples are for, I mean something very different. The Gothic cathedral, for example, might be said to have replaced stone walls with stained glass to give people a sense of heaven. Or the Chinese imperial city might be said to have been designed to make even the most important visitor feel insignificant. It does an outstanding job of that.
So what did the designers of India's temples a thousand years ago want people to feel? This is a hard question to answer, partly because nearly everything you can read about these temples is preoccupied with form, plus devotional practice and legends about this or
that temple's founding. You might turn to the few surviving ancient construction manuals, but they too are preoccupied with shapes and say little or nothing about effect.
The best answer I've found to my question is in a set of two books, heavy both literally and figuratively. Their author was Stella Kramrisch, an Austrian with a doctorate from the University of Vienna. No less than Rabindranath Tagore had invited her to India, and Kramrisch spent about 20 years there before moving to the United States in the 1940s and dying at the age of 97 in 1993.
Her two volumes, published by the University of Calcutta in 1946, are called The Hindu Temple. They were originally hardbound with covers the color and texture of unbleached khadi, that Indian cloth that Gandhi made famous. That's probably not an accident. The simple title of the books, however, is very misleading. I at least find the books largely impenetrable, stuffed as they are with Sanskrit terminology, but with regard to my question about the purpose of Hindu temples Kramrisch is superlatively succinct. The temple, she writes, is "the concrete symbol of Reintegration."
Wow. I hear somebody say, “Oh, brother, here comes the Maharishi.” An equally sarcastic voice asks what's being reintegrated and what's it being reintegrated into. I ask those questions myself, and it doesn't help that Kramrisch never offers straight-up answers. Perhaps the answers are obvious, or perhaps it's time for that inspired misquote from Star Wars—break me a fucking give—but now that I'm 80 I want to have Kramrisch's
words sewn onto the cuffs of my shirts so I won't forget them. More than that: as my 80th birthday present to myself I spent three weeks around a group of temples built about a thousand years ago in the Cauvery Delta.
The Cauvery River, I should say for anyone worried that I'm about to go off the deep end, is the most southerly of the great rivers flowing across India and into the Bay of Bengal. The river's mouths—like most big rivers the Cauvery has several--are most of the way down the east coast of the country. In fact the southern corner of the delta is hardly more than 30 miles from the northern tip of Sri Lanka. The delta is crowded, too. The biggest city is Tiruchirappalli. It was Trichinopoly in the bad old days of the British Empire.
Today it's mostly just Trichy. The city has about a million people, along with an airport with flights not only to Bangalore and Chennai but to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and a half dozen airports around the Gulf.
Like Cairo on the Nile, Trichy is at the delta's apex, about a hundred miles upstream from salt water. Downstream, Thanjavur has about 300,000 people. Kumbakonam has about half that, and Chidambaram has about half that. Together, these four old cities, once royal capitals and still the biggest cities in the delta, have a combined population of about
1.5 million. The delta as a whole, however, has a population of about five million. The conclusion I want you to draw is that if you go outside and yell, somebody will hear you. This density can be worrying, but if you have a flat tire on some minor road in the
Cauvery Delta, don't worry. A half-dozen young men will appear, and you may not even need to take out your jack.
I had been in this part of India in the 1990s, but then I had very little interest in reintegration, whatever that is. I was retracing the steps of Arthur Cotton, a cantankerous British engineer who, working for the East India Company in the 1830s, rebuilt the low dams or weirs built to divert Cauvery water into the delta's network of irrigation canals. These weirs had originally been built by the same kings who built the delta's temples, but by 1800 the weirs had fallen into disrepair. Referring to the most important of them, the one at Trichy, where the Cauvery throws off a major branch, Cotton wrote that “the people were stated to be nearly in a state of rebellion from its neglect. Is it surprising the people thought us savages?” An administrator in Cotton's time wrote that there was “not an individual in the province who did not consider the upper anicut [that's the local name for weir] the greatest blessing that had ever been conferred upon it.” You may be thinking this is just a Victorian justification for Britain's longstanding oppression of India, but I have heard irrigation officers say that farmers even now worship Arthur Cotton as a god, and at the site of Cotton's weir today, there's not only a monument built by the British but a newly installed and life-sized statue of Cotton. He's on horseback, gayly waving his hat. The statue is garishly painted and childishly misproportioned, but it should make us question our newly found and almost universal conviction that everyone and everything connected to Europe's empires is and was despicable. I know:
we won't do that. It's too risky. Try lecturing at a university and saying anything good about men like Arthur Cotton. Watch your audience squirm, and that's if you're lucky.
Back in the days when the original Cauvery weir was in good working order, half the laborers in the delta worked in the delta's rice fields. Almost everybody also worked, at least part-time, in the construction of temples, so I have to revise my opening statement and say that there are three ways, not two, of looking at Indian temples. The third way is seeing them as public-works projects. Make-work projects. Kings could build palaces, strengthen armies, develop irrigation works, and still have money left over. What to do with it? Besides, there was spiritual merit to be gained by sponsoring a temple, or at least the kings believed there was.
UNESCO, the U.N’s cultural agency, pops up in the American media whenever the U.S. government is baying for the agency's blood. I mention this because UNESCO has singled out three of the temples in the Cauvery Delta as World Heritage sites. The three are a temple in the center of Thanjavur, another on the southwest fringe of Kumbakonam, and a third halfway between Kumbakonam and Chidambaram. I'm shy to say their names, but here they are: the Brihadisvara temple at Thanjuvur, the Airavateswarar temple at Kumbakonam, and the Gangaikondacholapuram temple on the way to Chidambaram. Anyone familiar with these places will say that I mustn't forget the Ranganatha and Jambukeswara temples on Srirangam Island in the river at Trichy. I mustn't overlook the Nagesvaraswamy and Adi Kumbeshwarar temples in Kumbakonam.
Closer to the sea, there's also the Nataraja Temple at Chidambaram, for many people the most important of all. I imagine a comedian making a routine out of my struggle to pronounce these names. It would be hilarious, if audiences weren't afraid to laugh.
I had done more homework than usual for this trip and had a list of the dozen or so temples I wanted to see. Yes, they included the ones I've just tried to name. I assumed I'd be more likely to understand Stella Kramrisch's mantra about concrete symbols of reintegration if I could avoid crowds, and I knew that this would be hard to do. I also believed that I shouldn't work too hard. It's not that I'm lazy. It's just that I've learned that ifI want to learn something, just as ifI want to remember something, I shouldn't rack my brain. Instead, I should go wash some dishes or fold some laundry and let the little gray cells decide when to cooperate. It's odd that we're not in full control of them, but then we can't tell our liver and kidneys what to do. Makes you wonder why we think we're in charge of ourselves.
So I left Houston, transited at Heathrow, and landed at Chennai, which half the time I still call Madras. I've never been as tired on arrival in India as I was this time. I checked into a hotel a few minutes before six in the morning and spent the day sleeping. The next morning I dragged myself back to the airport, flew an hour south to Trichy, then spent three hours trying to get my hands on the rental car that I had already put a deposit on. I shouldn't complain. The car never gave me any trouble, and the guy at the rental-car office—he was working solo—was amazingly even-tempered. His office was a couple of
miles from the airport and consisted of an unpaved lot with two cars and a small,
locked-tight building. He had to do everything while sitting on the building's porch with a pad of paper and a cell phone connected to a boss in Bangalore. Somebody was bashing metal next door.
And so I was off. You'd think there would be good road maps of India. There used to be, but they're out of date and nobody's publishing new ones. It's like gas-station maps in the United States, which have been displaced by Google Maps or one of its relatives. She—I mean, Lady Google--did pretty well guiding me to the AirBnB I had booked on Srirangam Island a half-dozen miles to the north. In the coming weeks she would occasionally get hopelessly confused, but without her I hate to think how long it would have taken me to get to my room at the edge of a coconut plantation.
That sounds exotic, but don't get your hopes up. Indian builders have their own esthetic, which almost always amounts to building a brick cube, then plastering it or, if they want to make an impression, dressing up the facade with lots of eye-catching colors and glass. Windows are an afterthought, and though they've become customary, Indians usually want privacy more than a view and so the glass in my room was frosted. And don't look at me so disapprovingly: almost two centuries ago the first Britisher to really study Indian architecture pointed out that, despite their fabulous ornamentation, Hindu temples are structurally primitive. He was a Scot, James Fergusson. I'm still impressed by his endurance, travelling across India, as he wrote, “from end to end and from side to side.”
This was before railroads, and Fergusson traveled by camel. He was also very opinionated, which makes him a lot more fun to read than books written by today's experts.
From a porch on the top floor of the B&B, I could see one of the gopurams or pyramidal towers of the Ranganatha Temple, one of India's largest temples and for that reason, sad to say, one of its most important temples. The gopuram towered above urban congestion. Yes, it's time for another rude awakening. Srirangam Island is about 20 miles long, and though the upstream and downstream thirds are rural, the central third is as packed as Bombay. That may sound exaggerated, but one morning, while naively obeying the Lady, I found myself forced to drive at less than walking speed through a crowded and extravagantly colorful flower market, with heaps of blossoms blocking my way. Vendors stared at this idiot. I smiled and inched my way past them with no more damage than one hard tap on my left rear quarter-panel. I kept smiling and looking lost. That part was easy.
I have to explain that the temples I'd see on this trip generally sit at the center of a set of nested rectangles and in principle have a gopuram at the midpoint of each side of each rectarigle. Often, within the set of rectangles there will be several subsidiary shrines but each temple has one primary god in a shrine positioned at the center of all the rectangles. That shrine usually faces east, so the sun shines into it on certain days. In the case of the Ranganatha Temple, dedicated to Vishnu, there are four rectangles complete with walls
and gopurams. Beyond the outermost wall there are four more rectangles, but they are hardly more than streets lined with residential and commercial buildings.
I say “hardly more” because these outer rectangles sometimes have freestanding gopurams, suggesting that walls were planned but never built. From time to time, too, at places where gopurams might have been expected, I would pass stone posts about two feet by four feet thick and rising a good 30 feet into the air. God knows how much of their length was buried in the island's soft soil. The faces of the posts were rough hewn but sometimes had ornaments carved into them. I eventually realized that these posts were the first steps in building a gopuram. If the towers had been completed, the posts would have been largely hidden from sight, which suggests that their ornaments were intended not to please visitors but to respect the gods. It's not so surprising: gopurams symbolize Mt. Kailash, the Himalayan home of the Hindu gods. Kailash is a real mountain, by the way, well over 20,000 feet above sea level, though in Tibet and therefore now in China.
Why were these gopurams never finished? Well, blame the Europeans, because both the French and later the British commandeered these works in progress and made many of them into fortresses. The British finally felt secure enough in their rule over India to vacate the premises and allow the temples to be reconsecrated. The Indian Mutiny broke out some years later, which suggests that the British didn't know India as well as they thought they did, but the Mutiny was mostly an affair of the North, not the South.
A bit more description: gopurams are as stylized as church steeples. There's a two-story stone base, in the Cauvery delta of a cinnamon-colored granitic stone. This base supports a largely hollow brick tower with stacked ranks of deities, all painted so colorfully that it's easy to overlook the base, which itself is covered with carved ornaments and
life-sized figures of divinities. At its midpoint, the base also has a corridor allowing passage through the rectangle, and at the center of that passage there are openings closed to the public but leading into the higher levels of the pyramid. There may be only a few of these levels, or there may be more than a dozen, but all the tiers have gods arrayed on both sides of the central passage. At the top of the pyramid, there's a barrel-vaulted or wagon-vaulted cap. It's a lot like a beer can laid on its side, which sounds terrible, but the shape is actually very elegant. I particularly like it because it's at rest, unlike spires. I understand that some people want to direct our attention up, up, ever higher, but that image lost its force with Copernicus. I know, the force of habit is strong, but we really should remind ourselves that there's a lot less up there than there is down here.
Securely Victorian, James Fergusson was caustic in condemning the design of these temples. He was annoyed mostly, it seems, because the tallest gopurams are at the outermost wall. Everything grows smaller as you approach the center, where the shrine is often no larger than a village temple. Fergusson actually wrote, quote, “as an architectural design it is altogether detestable.” Well, you don't have to ask him how he really feels, but I think he's wrong. The design reminds me of a few school teachers I had. Out in the
hallways we were surrounded by bells and buzzers and yelling and PA announcements, but in their classrooms these teachers never raised their voices. It was much more effective than shouting.
There's another odd thing about these temples, which is that they generally are older than their gopurams. It may just be that the gopuram form was invented one fine Tuesday, judged outstanding, and then tacked on to the temples for the same reason that action movies get crazier every year. You have to keep your audience. But a Victorian civil servant and scholar had another idea. He was Arthur Burnell, best known today as the
co-author of a fascinating and highly browsable dictionary called Hobson Jobson, an odd name for a dictionary, but it's an odd dictionary, just listing words that the British learned to use in India. Burnell in 1877 wrote that gopurams were added to temples only after India began suffering Muslim invasions. The gopurams in short were defensive. I suppose they were defensive both functionally and symbolically, as if even a Muslim army would think twice about attacking the home of the gods. Burnell's suggestion doesn't get a lot of traction today, perhaps because Indians don't like to be reminded of the centuries of oppression that began long before the Europeans arrived.
I was having a hard time walking—back problems can be a trip all their own—and so I drove the mile or less over to the gopuram I could see from the B&B balcony. This tower marked the center of the north side of the seventh rectangle. There was no wall on this rectangle, which rose above a residential neighborhood, but I wasn't sure if I was allowed
to drive through the opening. Later, I saw lots of people doing it. It does seem a little disrespectful.
Also, I wasn't confident about parking, so I turned left and drove to the northeast comer of the rectangle. Then I turned right and drove south to the outermost gopuram on the east side. There was no designated parking here either, but I found a spot where I wouldn't block a driveway. I walked through the gopuram, which at about 150 feet high towered over the neighborhood. A second gopuram stood in front of me and then a third. This third gopuram was the first that was part of a wall, in its case a wall with a length of about 1,300 feet. (This by the way was another red flag for James Fergusson, who thought it was nuts for temples to have so few entrances.) I started to walk though this gopuram when somebody barked, “Shoes.” Yes, of course. I left them at a kiosk, then more or less limped through the gopuram, which above its base was painted entirely white—an unusual reminder of a young woman who is said to have sacrificed herself to protect the temple when it came under attack by a Muslim army in about the year 1200.
Once though this gopuram, I was in an unpaved courtyard with a very unusual floor of coarse sand. A coconut grove had until recently filled this space, but the trees for some reason had been decapitated, leaving a set of round posts. Both to my right and left there were halls with hundreds of omately carved stone columns. Fergusson, bless his heart, counted 953 of them in the hall on the right—all spaced as regularly as the coconut stumps. There were no walls, just columns supporting a flat and tremendously heavy
stone roof. It's hard to imagine how such a space could be used, though I can imagine pilgrims staking out a private plot bounded by four columns.
There was a wall in front of me. I walked around to its corner on my left and found an opening into another courtyard. I found an opening in that courtyard's wall and was suddenly looking at a hundred or more people gazing raptly toward the temple's main shrine, its doors about to open on schedule.
This shrine, like others I would see, operated on a schedule far more precise than the airline that had brought me to India. Ceremonies were held at several times in the morning and again in the evening, but from noon until about four the temple was closed. The priests needed a break, it seems, though I often saw them lolling about during working hours. Perhaps that's my anti-clericalism talking, but the priests did sit around a lot, springing into action chiefly when they saw a camera or cell phone in one of the many areas with signs prohibiting those things on pain of confiscation. Funny, because the priests themselves often sat around playing with their own cell phones.
Places don't get much more sacred than this, and so I was shocked by a large flat-panel screen playing a recording of some ceremony. Surely someone would get rid of the thing, but no, loudspeakers added recorded music, and there were fluorescent tubes fixed to the heavy stone roof. I hate those things and found them especially disgusting here.
Best of all, by which I mean worst of all, an ATM sat waiting for visitors who wanted to
increase their temple donations. The priests who ran the temple had thought of everything.
I don't like to be in tight spaces packed with people, so I wasn't keen to join the crowd when the shrine finally opened. I didn't have to hem and haw in this case, because a
large sign next to the door to the shrine said Entry Restricted to Hindus. I've never seen a church restricting entry to Christians. Was this another expression of India's still unhealed wounds from centuries of foreign rule?
This actually came up at breakfast the next day, when I chatted with a couple who had come from Gujarat mostly because the wife wanted to pray here. The husband, who said he would have been happy to stay home in his garden, was explaining to me that Hinduism is wonderfully undogmatic, asking us to take nothing on faith and instead to judge for ourselves. He contrasted this with Islam and Christianity, and that led straight to the centuries of oppression. He caught me off guard by saying that the British had been worse than the Muslims. Yes, he admitted, the Muslims were more brutal, but they weren't racists. That's what seemed to burn deepest. I asked him gently how he felt about Americans. He smiled and said it was too soon to say.
The funny thing is that my disparaging remarks about the barbaric improvements to the shrine surprised his wife. I don't mean that she was annoyed. I mean that she had been
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in the temple the day before and hadn't noticed those things. I see the equivalent of linoleum hiding the mosaic floor of a Roman villa. She doesn't.
I suppose the lesson is that we see or hear as much and perhaps even more with our minds than we do with our eyes and ears. I'm the same way. Once I was driving on a quiet road in Germany. I must have been listening to U.S. Armed Forces Radio, because the station was carrying the first performance ever given by the New York Philharmonic in Beijing. What did the concert begin with? This was not the United States Marine Band, for God's sake; it was Gustave Mahler's orchestra, but the first number on the program—wait for it—was “The Star Spangled Banner.” Unbelievably cheesy, I thought. Nonetheless, I found myself tearing up. It's like the Gujarati wife: what I think matters less than how I've been taught. My tears surprised me, but I couldn't countermand them. I don't even know where tears come from.“
The next morning I returned to the temple. I wanted this time to enter through the south gate, which has the biggest gopuram. The ladies at the kiosk were happy to take my shoes without telling me that the temple was closed. A couple of minutes later, I figured this out, and they gave me my shoes back. The temple was closed because a procession was on its way, with an image of Vishnu being carried around the temple perimeter. This happens a lot, and the one procession I saw later that day was underwhelming, nothing like the huge chariot I saw years ago in Puri. Come to think of it, entry to that temple, too, was restricted to Hindus.
What to do? I looked up and down the wall, painted in vertical stripes of red and white topped with a rippling battlement, perhaps a European addition. To the south there was a street converted to a block-long pedestrian mall, and at the far or south end of that mall there was a freestanding gopuram, the biggest of them all. A few years earlier it had been rejuvenated, and the architect responsible for the work had put up a big sign, including his phone number, on one of the lower tiers. I suppose he'd say this was no different than a painter signing his work, but the sign wasn't subtle. I wonder if the architect even saw the rusty brackets that carried a bunch of old electric wires through the ground-level passage.
I think of the British pushing the Turks out of Jerusalem in 1918 and then cleaning up that city's wall and leaving it looking better than it had looked for centuries, at least in British eyes and for that matter in the eyes of Israelis today. Tourists, too. But if gopurams are a symbol of Mt Kailash, and if you gaze on them in the sure knowledge that you are seeing the home of the gods, maybe you don't notice the clutter of wires.
You can think of me crying on that German road, or you can think of Americans who have seen a hundred buildings derived from the Parthenon but who have yet to notice that the portico of the White House is crudely proportioned. It doesn't bother us. In fact we'd probably resist rebuilding it properly. Changing it would erase one of the navigational aids that help us find our way.
The temple gate eventually opened, and I headed straight to the Krishna temple, which is off to the left side of the fourth courtyard, or the courtyard between the third and fourth walls. This is the temple that architectural students like best, mainly because it's not in use and therefore has been spared the improvements that aren't. I was disappointed to see that somebody had recently taken paint to the temple's dome, a hemisphere over the shrine. (I say dome, but it's not a true dome. Until the Muslim invasions, India had only the corbelled dome. Anyway, it looks like a dome.) The temple doors were locked tight, and I had to climb over a low fence just to see parts of the exterior walls, which were blessedly unpainted. They were covered with images including Krishna playing his flute and Krishna fondling pneumatically breasted young women. In a few cases, the fondling had moved on to broad-daylight intercourse, but this was much less prominent than it is at some other Indian temples, such as those at Khajuraho.
I was slightly disappointed but perhaps not for the reason you think. These figures of joined couples, called mithuna in Sanskrit, are popularly taken as proof of ancient India's delight in sensual pleasure. If that's how you interpret them, you have to wonder why Indian movies are so inhibited, but Stella Kramrisch comes to the rescue by saying that only the ignorant take these images literally. The mithuna instead are a symbol of people being part of something bigger than themselves. They are a symbol, in short, of partial reintegration. I have to admit that this is a long way from the Playboy magazines of my adolescence. That magazine pretended that sex was about two people making each other
feel good. Well, as the gentleman from Gujarat would say, judge for yourself. For my part, I say more power to Stella.
About a mile to the southeast, there's another famous temple, the Jambukeshvara. James Fergusson wrote that it was smaller than the Ranganatha but more beautiful. A century later, Percy Brown, perhaps the most eminent student of Indian architecture in the last days of the Raj, wrote that the interior of the Jamkeshvara was the finest in South India. Obviously I should see it. Besides, I was coming to the conclusion that there was no “there there” at the Ranganatha temple, which lacked the coherence that makes a place a place. I could study the measured diagram that a certain Captain R A Cole had drawn early in the 19th century. The diagram certainly helped me orient myself, and it's so widely useful that it pops up in Wikipedia's entry for the temple. The trouble is that the diagram just adds more facts, and I'm reminded of Mark Twain's serious joke that it's easier to generate seven facts than one emotion.
So I drove over to the west entrance of the Jambukeshvara, lost my shoes, and limped through one gopuram, a courtyard, and then another gopuram. Now I was in a dark hall with an avenue straight ahead. It was bordered by intricately carved columns and led to four piers spaced like those of a cathedral crossing. Here's Percy Brown again: “Massive as are the solid shafts of these piers, ornamented with a triple pilaster on each face, their capitals and superstructures are even more stupendous, as they spread out like inverted pyramids into a phenomenal width.”
I must have read those words before I showed up at the temple, but I only understand them now. I found the piers breathtaking. Yes, stupendous. I'm not sure I'd call them beautiful; maybe opulent. The piers were certainly a tour de force, their masons saying , “Look what we can do.”
If you think of the Parthenon, you see fluted shafts and Doric capitals. I'm not saying that the Parthenon columns are simple—they're masterfully tapered—but there aren't a lot of parts you can name. These piers, on the other hand, have literally dozens of nameable layers stacked on top of each other. Standing there, or actually leaning against something, I didn't even notice the fluorescent tubes placed at the top of the columns, and I didn't kvetch about the crappy metal fencing that blocked off the floor between the piers. The only thing I couldn't ignore was a young man who came over and out of the blue said, “5,000 years old.” He might as well have started talking about extraterrestrials in Peru.
I shouldn't pick on him. I'd rather pick on the priests in charge of the temple. They had ordered the placement of an electric sign smack over the entrance through the second gopuram. “Shiva Shiva,” it said in big pink letters, as though anyone able to read the sign—it was written in Tamil—needed to be told that this was a Shiva temple. You might as well put up a big electric sign reading The Lincoln Memorial over, of course, the Lincoln Memorial. Way up on top of the gopuram, there was a steel pole holding a
half-dozen loudspeaker horns. Brilliant. No barbarism too great. Am I being disrespectful? I say the Gujarati gentleman has it right. Judge for yourself.
Why should I just think about Tiananmen Square the way the Chinese are taught? Should I see the Nuremberg parade ground as ecstatic Nazis do?
There was something else, too. On a second visit to the Jambukeshwara, I entered through the much quieter east gopuram, its base alone composed of dozens of nameable parts. I wandered past pools and gardens into a courtyard and finally managed to find a ledge where I could sit and look at a stone kiosk in front of me. It was about 12 feet square, with a stone roof weighing at least 50 tons and supported by four fluted columns about 12 feet high. Each column was composed of a dozen stacked parts: the fluted section was in the middle, between complicated forms above and below it.
Immediately behind the kiosk there was a concrete platform about three feet high and measuring perhaps thirty feet by sixty. The platform was shaded by a roof of corrugated sheet metal supported by steel I-beams. How tacky, I thought, but then “how sensible.” It's not that I prefer sheet metal to thatch or wood or stone, but think of the labor that went into quarrying the kiosk's stone, transporting it, shaping it, assembling it. Even if this was all about keeping people employed, wasn't there a better way to do that? How about public schools? My God, how radical. Better to keep ‘em dumb and busy moving rocks. The gopuram just beyond the platform made the case all by itself. A scholar named James Harle has written that this gopuram is exact copy of one at Chidambaram.
Well, whoopee. If I make an exact copy of “A Starry Night,” will you think that I'm another Vincent?
And I'm not finished. All this prodigious labor set the stage for a shrine that measures about fifteen feet square. Non-Hindus were again excluded. No problem, I found a barred window looking into the shrine's anteroom. A hundred or more men and women were jammed together as they inched forward to see Shiva's phallic symbol. I couldn't see it, but if I turned my head ninety degrees and looked through some more bars, I could see the exterior of the shrine. It was a cube supporting a corbelled-dome alive with ornamentation. Which raises the question: why bother with all the rest? Without the towers and stupendous stonework would the crowds have stayed home?
I took this as my cue to visit a village temple. I chose the Sri Visamangelesvara Temple, about eight miles downstream from Srirangam Island. It's close to the town of Lalgudi, but Google Maps does not give the village itself a name. It's shaped like a caterpillar, long and thin, with all the residents—a few hundred, I'd guess—hugging the levee that parallels the river and rises above the surrounding rice paddies. The levee is just wide enough to carry the one-lane road that is the village lifeline.
I knew of this temple because S.R. Balasubrahmanyam, a leading authority, contributed a short essay about it to an appallingly erudite tome called Studies in Indian Temple Architecture. The book was published in 1975, and I don't know how long before then
Balasubrahmanyam had last seen the temple. The chronology is relevant because the temple since then has been “improved” beyond recognition. Sure enough, its basic design is like the shrine at Jambukeshwara, minus the heroic stuff. There's a false-domed roof on a square building in this case about 12 feet on a side and similarly opening into an anteroom. Two sides of the shrine were still intact, by which I mean unimproved. They were of elaborately carved stone, though the statues that Balasubrahmanyam had praised had for some reason been replaced. Two other sides were now hidden behind concrete additions, complete with protective jail bars. The dome had been rebuilt too, with a different profile, more spherical than the graceful original.
Perhaps because Balasubrahmanyam had drawn attention to it, the temple was now protected by a locked fence. It was also covered with bamboo scaffolding, preparatory to a paint job. I parked, got out of my car, rattled the gate's padlock, and looked forlorn. A young woman, a teenager if you count years, left her goats alone for a minute, went into a house, and came out with a key. She let me in without a word, and I wandered around getting discouraged. The best thing was that, as I was leaving, she adamantly and repeatedly refused to take any money. India is full of people waiting for money to fall
out of foreign pockets, and here she was, saying in words I could not understand that we should not contaminate a holy place with money. So much for English cathedrals charging admission.
I wasn't doing too well looking for symbols of reintegration. Instead, I was finding virtuoso displays of stonework in the service of kings, plus recent desecrations claiming to be improvements. I remember years ago in Lagos a minister standing outside his church and telling me that Nigerians were so caught between cultures that they no longer knew who they were. That's pretty harsh, and I suppose you could argue that everyone everywhere today is, as we wretchedly say, conflicted.
Things came into sharper focus a day later, when I rolled into Tanjore. Sorry, the new name is Thanjavur. This is the home of the Big Temple. That's the name I heard. It sounds like a name created just for foreigners, but the temple's proper name is the Brihadeshwara Temple, which translates as Giant Lord Temple. That's not so far from Big Temple. Nominally the name refers to Lord Shiva but it might as well be understood as referring to Rajaraja I, the king who ordered the temple's construction and saw it through to completion just about a thousand years ago.
The Big Temple was the first Cauvery Delta temple to receive World Heritage status. That was in 1987, when UNESCO wrote with sublime confidence that “The Brihatdesvara Temple marks the greatest achievement of the Chola architects.” (Yes, Rajaraja I belongs to that dynasty, which ruled here from about 900 to about 1300.) Well, I don't believe that there's ever such a thing as a best building, or the best ice cream, or the best shoes, or the best anything, but praise for Brihatdesvara does go back all the way to James Fergusson, who admired the temple's unified plan and its
arrangement of heights, with the highest point directly over the central shrine, not at the temple's periphery.
This was also the first time on this trip I had seen a temple with a parking lot. For that, we can probably thank UNESCO, because World Heritage sites usually become tourist magnets and are managed accordingly. I crossed a busy street and looked at the first of two gopurams, mighty but not particularly tall. Both towers had a massive base proportioned like a Roman triumphal arch with the addition up top of a pyramid of three tiers. The biggest figures by far were of two guards, more or less human but perhaps ten feet tall and with fangs.
These were the first gopurams I had seen without paint. I attribute this, too, to UNESCO or possibly the Archaeological Survey of India. Either way, I would love to learn about the discussions that went into this departure from standard practice. The Big Temple had a ruff of well-tended lawn, too, something Rajaraja I never imagined. To European eyes, and mine, the natural stone and the green lawn are very nice, just inauthentic. Apparently we want to have our ruins look like we think they should look, not like they historically did look.
Once through the second gopuram—you don't have to duck, because the opening must be close to thirty feet high—you're in a rectangular court stretching 700 feet in front of you and about 350 feet side to side. There's almost nothing in your field of vision except the
wall around the courtyard and the shrine straight ahead. It's near the far side of the enclosure, like a throne set not in the center of a throne room but well back to increase its magnificence. In front of the tower there was an attached and roofed anteroom. People lined up here to enter the shrine to see the Shiva lingam. There was also a detached porch even closer to the courtyard entry: it held an oversized figure of Nandi, the bull Shiva rides. There were a few other structures in the enclosure, but they were thrown into the shade by the tower, which was over 200 feet high.
The bottom half of the tower was an elaborately ornate cube about 100 feet on a side; the top half was a set of 13 squares, each one smaller than the ones below. The top square, about 40 feet on a side, supported a stone hemisphere. The set of rising squares was elaborately ornamented, mostly with miniature barrel-vaulted buildings set in a row on each tier.
Balasubrahmanyam calls this tower a “marvel of engineering skill unparalleled by any structure anywhere in India built during that period.” Maybe so, but Adam Hardy, a British architect and historian of Asian architecture, writes that “the effect of the tower is multitudinous but monotonous.” I'm not sure what a multitudinous effect is, but I didn't find the tower monotonous. That's not to say I liked it. Instead, I found myself thinking of Angkor and especially the Bayon, that building whose every entrance is overlooked by giant, impassive faces of the king who built it. Of all the symbols of totalitarian states, this one for my money is the most frightening. Kings who command the construction of
such places are either all-powerful or, as some have suggested, worried about losing their power. I'm not sure which kind of king is more dangerous.
There was a crowd patiently lined up in the anteroom. Signs warned that cameras and cell phones would be confiscated, which is puzzling, since YouTube has videos of the lingam. Judging from them, I'd say it stands about 15 feet high, and I'd guess it's about four or five feet thick. It's not subtle: it's perfectly cylindrical except for the hemispherical top, ornamented with fresh garlands. I wasn't cheeky enough to ask people coming out of the shrine what they thought of it, but I bet that in the time of Rajaraja I people saw this lingam not only as a symbol of Shiva but of their king's potency. After all, when the temple was built it was known as Rajarajesvaram, the temple of the god of the king. Reminds me of the 1950s and 60s, when I bought
long-playing records. The jacket would show the name of the composer in letters an inch high, then the name of the conductor in letters three times bigger.
What I liked best about Tanjore wasn't the Big Temple or the royal palace with its imitation of the Big Temple. It was the Venner River, a distributary of the Cauvery. I saw it at a spot where it was three hundred feet wide and coming past me in a wide curve that brought the river into sight and then out. The bank opposite was forested. The surface of the water was smooth but moving with a perceptible current. There were lots of noisy birds and from time to time a jumping fish.
Dame Google, in one of her funnier moments, told me that it was less than an hour from here to Kumbakonan. I followed her instructions bravely as she took me on one-lane roads, paved but rough, wending from village to village. Well, India is still a country of villages, and the Cauvery Delta has been blanketed with villages for however long it's been a sea of rice paddies. There were very few cars on the road, but every now and then I'd see a freeway under construction. In a few years the drive from Tanjore to Kumbakonam may in fact take less than an hour. Not yet. The most surprising thing about the road was the occasional house that would have been perfectly at home in San Diego or Miami. Once upon a time, landlords would have built mansions out here, but India's old landlords are gone, and the money for these new palaces came—I'm guessing—from someone in Seattle or San Francisco. He or she probably didn't spend a lot of time here. Maybe the house was supposed to be for retirement, but right now it relaxed a driver stuck on 1-5 or the Bayshore Freeway. Somewhere in these houses I'll bet there's a charka, that little spinning wheel that Gandhi used. Its owner doesn't have a clue how to use it but likes looking at it.
And then, without much transition, there it was: the Airavatesvara Temple in Darasuram, a village on the outskirts of Kumbakonam. It was obviously a World Heritage site, first because a man asked for about a dollar to use the parking lot, and second because there was another green lawn. There's a third reason, too: the temple had no paint.
According to ancient inscriptions, the original name of this temple, too, is Rajarajeshvaram, in this case the temple of Rajaraja II. There's about a century separating the two Rajarajas, and during that century the royal desire to scare the hell out of people had apparently receded. Maybe the money to pay for scaring them was in short supply. In any case there was a temple wall about twenty feet high forming a rectangle about half the size of the one at Tanjore. The entrance was through a gopuram hardly more than twice the height of the wall. Inside, there was a shrine with a tower of six stories instead of a dozen, and the anteroom for some reason was so enlarged, so in your face, that there was none of that grandeur from the setback at Tanjore.
There was no crowd here, no line waiting to enter the shrine, so I saw the lingam in its womb—I'm translating the Sanskrit term for sanctum. Again, it was garlanded, and the entrance to the room was plated in gold or something that looked like gold. James Fergusson might have scolded Indians for making these sanctums so plain, but for me the simplicity is a reminder that after all the stuff of our lives, there's only this. I'm reminded of Tolstoy's novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych, where a bureaucrat preoccupied with his career falls ill, does not get better and, at the last moment, says, “So that's it.” He's gotten past being angry or bitter, and now he's just surprised that it took him so long to figure it out. Of course when it comes to defining “it,” Tolstoy isn't any more helpful than Kramrisch talking about Reintegration. This bothered me a bit when I read the story in college. I kept asking myself if I had missed something.
I was staying in Kumbakonam now and after a day or two headed northeast twenty miles to Gangaikondacholapuram, the third World Heritage temple. Along the way, I crossed the main Cauvery distributary; the bridge was simply the dam built by the Brits late in their imperial day. India has improved it, but this shouldn't be a surprise to Americans who have to be blind not to know that India produces smart engineers by the truckful. A new freeway was under construction here, too. It was headed toward Chennai, some 200 miles to the north.
Gangaikondacholapuram was a city decreed by Rajendra, successor to Rajaraja I. His city is gone, but the temple remains. There's a highway junction here, which means the neighborhood is grubby, all the more so because the new freeway is coming through with an overpass so overpowering that it makes everything at its feet look like junk Anyway, you take a branch road, go a mile, turn, and park in a lot bordering some more lawn.
Then you walk through what I failed to realize was the stump of a ruined gopuram. Straight ahead there was a larger-than-life Nandi. He was looking foolishly at a blank wall.
It's very strange. We're inside the innermost rectangle—only one survives—and the courtyard is filled with the mighty shrine. But the porch to the shrine is elevated on a platform perhaps 20 feet high, which means that as Nandi looks at it and as visitors approach the shrine or even walk around it, they're all just looking at a blank wall. Yes, there are steps cut into the sides, so you can climb up to the anteroom and then walk
toward the sanctum, but there's none of Tanjore's sense of a throne room. There's only the tower of the shrine, which, at a half dozen tiers, is modest compared to the Big Temple.
I was a bit relieved to see that Adam Hardy, the modern critic I mentioned a few minutes ago, sharing my disappointment. He writes: “I would give Tanjavur and the rest and all the gold heaped at their doors by pious pilgrims, for the little temple at
Melai-Kkhadambur, which bulges with innocence and delight.” This was too good to let pass so I followed Lady Google on roads that made me wonder if I was going to get stuck. Don't believe her when she says it's half an hour from Gangaikondacholapuram
I could see the tower of the Melaikhadambur temple but wasn't sure how to get to it. I parked and started walking. People just pointed me to go this way, then that. I was a bit skeptical when a woman pointed down a path that ran between two walls about a yard apart, but she was right, because at the end of the path I turned left and saw a modest gopuram of two or three tiers. Then there was an open porch with carved columns and a nandi, half life-sized, and charming under a cap of freshly placed pink bougainvilleas.
There was the usual anteroom and then the shrine itself. This one wasn't spoiled. Above a plain base, including stone wheels hinting that the temple was getting ready to fly, the temple rose in black stone to a dome about 30 feet off the ground. All three sides of the shrine were alive with figurative sculptures. I'm reminded of some of the walls at the Alhambra, where, we read, the walls are covered with ornament applied from a fear of
emptiness. I don't know if that's an accurate explanation for why the Alhambra walls look as they do, but here the imagery was celebratory, not fearful. Stella Kramrisch, I should say, focusses her attention on Northern India, and she probably never saw or even heard of this little temple, but it's not crazy to see it as a symbol of an integrated world that one might feel part of. You might feel the same way at some of the bigger temples, except that they're too big. There is such a thing as a house that's too big to be comfortable.
By this time I knew my way around Kumbakonam. I had found the city's, as they say “reputed,” restaurant and found it worse than hospital food. I had a kitchen, but the city's best supermarket baffled me with countless packages of ingredients that I didn't know how to use. I wound up relying on yogurt, oatmeal, good green apples from New Zealand, and a no-name but excellent fast-food kiosk. The city's main street—like most main streets in India it has no name except for the cities to which leads one way and the other, looked at night surprisingly like Tokyo’s Ginza. Multi-story silk and jewelry stores here occupied prime space and were keen to tell the world. They must have relied heavily on pilgrims drawn to the city's temples, one of which had a main entrance only a secluded block from the most important intersection in town. Turn right at the Hotel Diamond, and the only challenge was finding a place to park for the Nagesvaraswamy Temple.
I must have been getting used to driving now, because I parked just opposite the generic gopuram, crossed the street, looked back once to see if the car was attracting attention, then lost my shoes and walked into a nondescript courtyard of utilitarian buildings that no architect would want to claim. An entrance straight ahead led through another gopuram with a flagstaff straight ahead. A Shiva temple, obviously. By this time I had seen a lot of buildings with elaborate columns resting on lions; so, too, horses pulling chariot wheels attached to the sides of temples. The life-sized statue here of an elephant dressed to kill was new, and then the original or core temple lay ahead, with an avenue of pillars charred black at the height where countless pilgrims had touched them for centuries.
Sure enough there was a Nandi and a lingam sitting in a dark room. A priest waved from his position under a large multilingual sign, and then I was outside, walking around the temple.
The ground was paved with brick, and the temple was stone with a riotous tower, three tiers of divinities looking like they were having a hell of a party. In the background there were palm trees in the temple's own garden, something of a miracle.
I walked around the south and west sides of the temple, then stopped at the north. My illegible notebook reads something like this: “India's never a bust. I have no idea why, but it's true. The experts say that this temple has superb sculpture, but they don't even try to explain what makes it superb. The stupid explanation would be to say that the figure
in front me smiles like the Mona Lisa. It would be stupid partly because the figure is
Brahma, not a woman, but it's stupid mostly because the smile isn't enigmatic. I think of Ivan Barker, my beloved high-school math teacher—I really did love him—the day that I handed him my solution to a geometry problem that for some reason he had assigned to me alone. My solution was clumsy, but it worked, and he smiled. It wasn't a big smile; no teeth, just a kindly expression that said, “well, that wasn't so hard, was it.”
Subrahmanyam does say that the figure has a “vitality and intensity unknown in other Cola examples.” Well, that's great, but it still doesn't explain the power of this smile. I see Stella Kramrisch perking up and asking if I've sorted out this business of Reintegration yet.
There's a much busier temple about 600 meters due west of the Nagesvaraswamy. It's the Adi Kumbeshvarar or Old Kumbeshvarar temple. I slipped in a through a side entrance. No gopuram but a courtyard with the usual array of columns and guardians. Signs posted the hours of opening, with the usual long lunch. The building itself had been barbarized decades back, with plastered walls added at the periphery. The columns there were exposed between short lengths of wall, and each bit of the wall was fitted with jailhouse bars.
I sat down on a stone platform close to the shrine and across from a man, perhaps in his 50s. He was almost bald but had a neatly trimmed white beard. He was sitting cross legged on the stone floor and had a cell phone balanced on one leg. He wore glasses and
was reading from a book whose pages hardly turned. He rocked gently as he chanted from the Tevaram, a collection of sacred poems older than any of the temples I was visiting. I wanted to engage him in conversation, but he ignored me and just kept going. I don't think he ever looked at me or at any of the people who passed between us on their way out of the shrine. They ignored him, too. I wasn't sure why he chose to chant the poems here, but the acoustics were excellent, resonant. An elephant stood outside, a necklace of bells ringing. The animal kept shifting his weight from foot to foot compulsively. I know next to nothing about elephants, but it seemed to me as if he was quietly losing his mind.
Of all the temples I visited, arguably the most important was the Nataraja Temple at Chidambaram. Yes, I still think rankings are stupid, but Tamil speakers often call the Nataraja Temple simply “the temple.” That's because the Tevaram, those ancient poems I had just heard chanted, were thought lost for centuries until, about the year 1000, they were found written on palm leaves and piled carelessly in a locked room in the Nataraja temple.
Chidambaram is about a two-hour drive northeast of Kumbakonam, and I knew driving here would be fun when I saw the bypass under construction. Sure enough, the city's main streets—named simply North, East, South, and West—formed a box around the rectangle of the temple. All four of those streets were commercial and intensely busy, but I managed to find places to stop.
The temple's gopurams, oddly, are not at the midpoints of the rectangular sides. The north gopuram has an excuse, because if it were at the midpoint of the north side everyone entering the temple would have to detour around a large pool or tank, as Indians say, murky green with patches of algae. There's no obvious explanation for the offset placement of the gopurams on the other three sides. What's more, the rectangle within that rectangle is not quite cardinal and reaches out a thick leg west at its northwest corner to enclose two subsidiary temples, one for a son of Shiva known as Subrahmanyam or Muragan and one for Shiva's wife Parvati, known here as Shiva Kumasundari.
I walked through the north gopuram and wondered what the temple priests were thinking when they chose a shocking pink for the openingd into the gopuram's upper levels. I more or less hurried past the two misfit temples, and it only dawned on me later that they were the oldest buildings in the entire complex. It's hard to believe, but both were fenced off and the Subrahmanya temple was turning into a forest. Abandoned temples are exceptionally atmospheric, but the architectural program here is like Italy deciding to fence off the forum and send visitors to the Victor Emmanuel Monument.
There were two more rectangles. The first only had openings on the west and east sides, which was curious because it left Nandi, on the south side, staring at another blank wall. I went in the west opening, which was not quite in line with the west gopuram, and found myself in a quadrilateral courtyard that was entirely roofed. The columns were elaborate
but new enough that their stone had come from the quarry by rail. A priest barked when I held up my cell phone, and it began to dawn on me that half the reason for the prohibitions against photography was that the priests didn't want the world to see what a hash they had made of these places.
There were only two ways through the final rectangle: they were on the south and east sides. Go figure. I circumnavigated to the east entrance. Once again, a crowd was mesmerized by a ceremony underway in the anteroom to the sanctum. Priests were scurrying about with trays laden with flaming charcoal.
When the ceremony ended, I went over to the west side of the sanctum and found a step where I could sit. People were lining up for a chance to climb five or six stairs up to a side door into the anteroom. A layman was trying to direct traffic. He was having a hard time, in part because he was making sure that all the men wanting to go inside stripped to their waists. I hemmed and hawed, then decided what the hell. I don't often get reminded how weird white skin is.
After seeing o many places built of stone, it was odd to find that the roof of the anteroom rested on columns of wood, gracefully swollen at their midpoint and booted in sheets of copper. A few stairs led into the sanctum, and they were plated or paved with silver.
Real or not, I can't say. Barriers kept me away from the axis leaving into the sanctum, so I couldn't see what was there. Nobody except the temple's hereditary priests was allowed
inside, but it is said—which is a fine way of saying I can't prove this—that there are two emblems of Shiva here. One is the classic image of Shiva dancing, that is to say the image of Nataraja, the four-armed Lord of the Dance, balanced on one leg. Fine. The other was the Akasha lingam. The word akasha translates as space or void or ether.
Some texts say that there is a crystal lingam here, but the ones I like take a stricter line and say that this lingam, like space, is invisible. The Akasha Shiva symbolizes the most important of the five elements in India's ancient cosmology—most important because earth, water, wind, and fire, cannot exist without it. The emblems are said to be behind a curtain, the outside red and the inside black, the one side representing illusion and the other truth, truth in this instance meaning the awareness that Brahma resides unseen within the human heart.
This is either screwy or, as it seems to me, very cool. Judge for yourself. A visible equivalent can be seen on the temple's gopurams, which pair images of Shiva as all powerful and Shiva as a beggar. Which is it? Obviously both. Who was it who said that the universe is stranger not than we imagine but than we can imagine?
Something about the curtain—remember, I couldn't see it—got me thinking about what the world feels like when you're on the red side of it or the other. I have a fair idea of the red side, because I read or at least subscribe to a dozen newspapers. I'm topped up. The other side? Well, the other side brings us back to Stella and Reintegration. She actually does offer a bit more detail, because she says that the Hindu temple is “an intricate
instrument of precision and enduring stability” that “leads to final unity.” I think she's talking about what happens when we check out.
Well, we're not supposed to dwell on this stuff. “Get a grip, man!” I understand. I'm supposed sometime in the next few days to pick up my wife's car, which was damaged in a hail storm. She wants it back all pretty. Just a month ago a young doctor was telling how he loved to run marathons. He wasn't trying to make me feel bad, but he was kind of succeeding. I was missing out on stuff. Nobody wants to do that. We're supposed to keep going for it, whatever “it” is.
Would thinking about the black side of the curtain make any difference to how we live? Maybe we wouldn't wait until the last moment of our lives before saying, like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, “So that's it!” I do wonder now if Wordsworth scribbling away with that line about getting and spending and laying waste our powers had any interest in Asian religions. I only know one person who understands this stuff well enough that the temples don't have anything to teach her. I've known her a long time. She never talks about them. Amazing, really.