Hindu Temples of the Cauvery Delta (India)

For a transcript, see https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784

For pictures, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

What is the purpose of an Indian temple?  The purpose of a Gothic cathedral is to give people a sense of heaven. The purpose of the Chinese imperial city is to make the most important visitor feel insignificant.

So what did the designers of India's temples a thousand years ago want people to feel? The best answer I've found to this 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 in covers wrapped with burlap.   The simple title of the books, however, like the simple material on the covers, is misleading, because the insides of the books are stuffed with Sanskrit terminology.  The text is more or less impenetrable for me, yet with regard to my question about the purpose of these temples Kramrisch is superlatively succinct. The Hindu temple, she writes, is "the concrete symbol of Reintegration."

I hear somebody say, “Oh, brother, here comes the Maharishi.” 

Now that I'm 80, however, 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 main 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 usually called Trichy. The city has about a million people, along with an airport with flights not just 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.  Thanjavur, halfway to the sea, has about 300,000 people.  Still farther downstream, Kumbakonam has about half that, and Chidambaram, five miles from the surf, 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, so if you go wandering around in the delta and for some reason or other give a good shout, somebody will always hear you. 

I had been in this part of India in the 1990s.  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 centuries earlier 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, 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.”   

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, 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 the conviction that everyone and everything connected to Europe's empires is and was despicable. 

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.   They found time to work as well on temples commissioned by kings seeking spiritual merit.  UNESCO, the U.N.’s cultural organization, has put three of these temples on its World Heritage list. 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 overlook the Ranganatha and Jambukeswara temples on Srirangam Island in the river at Trichy. Also, 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.

I had done more homework than usual for this trip and had a list of the dozen or so temples I wanted to see.  So I left Oklahoma City, transited at Houston and 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 it 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 somewhere, I don’t know, I think 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, vanished like the snows of yesterday, but 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 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 glass and bold colors. 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: I’m the Quintessence of Politesse compared to James Fergusson, the leading Victorian student of Indian architecture.  

I'm still impressed by Fergusson’s 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. I’ll get back to him in a bit.

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.  For that reason, I’m sorry to say, it is considered an important temple. 

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 rectangle. 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 it’s 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 looks a lot like a beer can laid on its side, which I know sounds terrible, but the shape is actually very elegant. I think I  like it because it's at rest, unlike spires. I understand that some people want to direct our attention up, up, ever higher, but there's a lot less up there than there is down here.

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, “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 knew. Out in the hallways we were surrounded by bells and buzzers 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. 

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.  It’s an odd name for a dictionary, but Hobson Jobson is 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.  Not that the towers offered much real defensive strength.  Rather, armies might be intimidated by the thought of attacking the home of the gods, even if those armies dismissed those particular gods as fake.  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—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 framed a residential neighborhood, but I wasn't sure if I was allowed to drive through the gopuram’s opening. Later, I saw lots of people doing it. It does seem disrespectful.

Also, I wasn't confident about parking, so I turned left and drove to the northeast corner 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 ridiculous 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 ornately carved stone columns. Fergusson, bless his heart, counted 953 of them just 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 showing, 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 should turn the thing off, but no, loudspeakers added recorded music, and there were fluorescent tubes fixed to the heavy stone roof. Best of all, by which I mean worst of all, an ATM sat waiting for visitors who wanted to add to 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 think about it, 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 hottest. 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 electronic additions to the shrine surprised his wife.  You might think she would be annoyed by my supercilious attitude, but no, she simply hadn’t noticed the fluorescent lights and the ATM.  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. 

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.  It was Gustave Mahler's orchestra, but the first number on the program was “The Star Spangled Banner.” Unbelievably cheesy, I thought.  Still, I found myself tearing up. It's like the Gujarati wife.  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. It 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 retrieved my shoes and looked up and down the wall, which was 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.

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 never notice that the portico of the White House is crudely proportioned.

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 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 things literally. The mithuna instead symbolize people being part of something bigger than themselves. They are a symbol of 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 British Raj, wrote that the interior of the Jamkeshvara was the finest in South India. 

Obviously I should see it. Besides, I was feeling lost in the Ranganatha temple’s walls and courtyards.  I could study the measured diagram that a certain Captain R. A. Cole had drawn early in the 19th century.  It helped.  It even pops up in Wikipedia's article on the temple. Still, learning to find my way around wasn’t the object of the exercise, which was to feel something. 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 found the piers breathtaking.  I'm not sure I'd call them beautiful.  Overpowering, perhaps.  Ornate certainly.  Stunning maybe.  I'd never say that the Parthenon columns are simple—they're masterfully tapered—but they don’t have a lot of parts you can name.  The Jambukeshvara piers, on the other hand, have literally dozens of named layers stacked on top of each other.  I didn't even notice the fluorescent tubes at the top of the columns or the cheap metal fence 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 on top of 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 on top of the Lincoln Memorial. Also 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.

On a second visit to the Jambukeshwara, I entered through the much quieter east gopuram. 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: a fluted section in the middle, between complicated forms above and below.

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 I-beams. How cheesy, I thought, but then “how sensible.” Think of the labor that went into quarrying the kiosk stone, transporting it, shaping it, assembling it.  Weren’t there better ways to keep people employed?  How about public schools?  Impossible, you say.  Unheard of.  Better to keep ‘em busy moving rocks.  Worse, this gopuram was an exact copy of one at Chidambaram.  The builders weren’t even attempting something new.

The shrine itself measured a mere fifteen feet square, or thereabouts.  Non-Hindus were again excluded, but 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 shrine inside an innermost courtyard.  The shrine was a cube supporting a corbelled-dome alive with ornamentation. Which raises the question: why bother with all the rest? Maybe the towers were defensive once, but now they seemed like gimmicks to draw a crowd.

I took this as my cue to visit an ordina village temple. I chose the Sri Visamangelesvara Temple, about eight miles downstream from Srirangam Island. It's close to the town of Lalgudi, but in a village that Google Maps does not name.  The village is shaped like a caterpillar, long and thin, with all its 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 erudite tome called Studies in Indian Temple Architecture. The book was published in 1975, and I don't know how long before that Balasubrahmanyam had 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 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, almost a perfect hemisphere.

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 is today, as we say, conflicted.

Things came into sharper focus a day later, when I rolled into Thanjavur, Tanjore in the days of the British raj.  Thanjavur is the home of the Big Temple. It sounds like a name created just for foreigners, but the temple's proper name is Brihadeshwara, 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 characteristic certainty 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 the best building, or the best ice cream, or the best shoes, or the best anything.  I believe that there are things I like and things that other people like.  Maybe we converge; maybe we don’t.  

Judge for yourself, the Gujurati gentleman had said, 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 the first temple I had seen with an adjoining parking lot.  We can probably thank UNESCO, because World Heritage status usually brings tourists. I crossed a busy street and looked at the first of two gopurams, not particularly tall. Both towers had a massive base proportioned like a Roman triumphal arch topped up with a pyramid of three tiers. The biggest sculptural figures were of two guards, 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 saw. To European eyes, and mine, the natural stone and the green lawn are very nice but inauthentic. Apparently it’s more important for ruins to look pretty than to look as they historically did.

Once through the second gopuram—I didn’t have to duck, because the opening was close to thirty feet high—I was in a rectangular court stretching 700 feet in front of me and about 350 feet side to side. There was almost nothing in my field of vision except the wall around the courtyard and the shrine straight ahead and 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 over the shrine, 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.  

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. 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 inches high.  Von Karajan was more important than Beethoven.

Dame Google told me that it was less than an hour from Thanjavur to Kumbakonan. I followed her instructions bravely as she took me on one-lane roads, paved but rough, wending from village to village.  There were very few cars on the road, but every now and then I'd see a freeway under construction. Someday, someday I could speed between the cities.  The most surprising thing about the road was the occasional house that would have been perfectly at home in San Diego or Miami. The money for these homes came—I'm guessing—from Seattle or San Francisco.  The owner probably didn't spend a lot of time here. Maybe the house was supposed to be for retirement, but right now thinking about it helped him or her relax.  So, perhaps did a charka, that little spinning wheel that Gandhi used. Its owner wouldn’t have a clue how to use it but liked 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.  A man asked for about a dollar to use the parking lot, and second because there was another green lawn. Here, 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, 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.

There was no crowd here, no line waiting to enter the shrine, so I saw the lingam in its womb—that’s the literal translation of the Sanskrit term for the temple’s 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, things get very simple. 

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 all out. Of course when it comes to defining “it,” Tolstoy isn't any more helpful than Kramrisch talking about Reintegration.

I was staying in Kumbakonam now and after a day or two headed northeast twenty miles to Gangaikondacholapuram, the third World Heritage temple.  Gangaikondacholapuram was a city decreed by Rajendra, successor to Rajaraja I.  The 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 overpowering everything around it.

I took a branch road, went a mile, turned, and parked in a lot bordering some more lawn. I walked through what I failed to realize was the stump of a ruined gopuram. Straight ahead there was a larger-than-life Nandi looking at a blank wall.

I was inside the innermost rectangle—only one survives—and the courtyard was filled with the mighty shrine. But the porch to the shrine was elevated on a platform perhaps 20 feet high, which means that as Nandi looked at it and as visitors approached it, they just looked at a blank wall. Yes, there were steps cut into the sides, so visitors could climb up to the anteroom and then walk toward the sanctum, but there was none of Tanjore's sense of a throne room. The tower over the shrine had a half dozen tiers, modest compared to the Big Temple.

Adam Hardy, the architect I mentioned a few minutes ago, 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.” The temple he’s praising is all of five miles from Gangakondachapuram, and I followed Lady Google instructions.  Don't believe her when she says it's half an hour.

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, which included stone wheels hinting that the temple was getting ready to take off, 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 I found it a powerful symbol of a world that one might feel part of. 

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 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 it leads–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 is 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.   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. This was my first life-sized statue of an elephant dressed for a parade, 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 then a lingam in a dark room. A priest waved from his seat under a large multilingual sign, and then I was outside, walking around the shrine.

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, which is 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: “The experts say that this temple has superb sculpture, but they don't even try to explain what makes it superb. The stupid explanation is to say that the figure in front me smiles like the Mona Lisa.  The figure is Brahma, not a woman, but the comparison to the Mona Lisa is mostly wrong 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. 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. It's the Adi Kumbeshvarar or Old Kumbeshvarar temple. I slipped in 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. 

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 talk to him, 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.  An elephant stood outside, a necklace of bells ringing. The animal kept shifting his weight from foot to foot. 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 would visit, 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, 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—in this case named simply North, East, South, and West—formed a box, a crowded box, around the rectangle of the temple. 

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, as Indians say, tank, 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 opening 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 Subrahmanyam 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 so new that their stone had arrived 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 tried the east side.  Once again, a crowd was mesmerized by a ceremony underway in the anteroom to the sanctum. Priests were hurrying with trays of 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 so 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, perhaps real.  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 don’t really know—that the sanctum contained two emblems of Shiva. 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. 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 is invisible. The Akasha Shiva symbolizes the most important of the five elements in India's ancient cosmology, most important because the others–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 meaning 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.  I’m not the first to say that the universe is stranger not than we imagine but than we can imagine.

Something about the curtain—it was hidden from view—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 mess of newspapers. I'm definitely 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, if you know what I mean.  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.

Would thinking about the black side of the curtain make any difference to how I live? Maybe I 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 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, but she never talks about this stuff.  It’s amazing, really.  We just have to work it out on our own.