Over eight days in Tamil Nadu I really feel the centuries ripen and coalesce inside me, like phrases discovering a tune. Doesn’t the surprise of the current second—and due to this fact of journey—generally lie exactly in its all-seeing belatedness, the means by which it might probably collect the complete previous into itself? Walking on the flagstones in the huge temple complicated devoted to the fish-eyed goddess Meenakshi in the historical metropolis of Madurai, residence to greater than 30,000 statues of celestials; or marvelling at the 80-ton cupola perched atop Eleventh-century monarch Rajaraja Chola’s magnificent Brihadeeswara Temple in Thanjavur (mentioned to have been hauled to the summit by a retinue of elephants on a ramp greater than 4 miles lengthy); or dealing with a life-sized elephant on the 43-foot-tall open-air frieze made in about AD 600 at Mahabalipuram, one of the -greatest examples of road artwork from the historical world, I really feel time otherwise. It’s an important, sensual power, as teasing as Vishnu’s enigmatic smile.
“In north India the great monuments of the past are usually royal palaces and forts,” observes my clever information and companion, N Paneer Selvam, whose two nice passions are temples and birds. “But the great dynasties in the south, such as the Pallavas and the Cholas, devoted their energies to building temples. There was a social consciousness among the monarchs: the king’s duty was to build a bridge between divine and human. So the temples were at the heart of the everyday life of old India. They were centres of learning and poetry, schools of music and dance, places of refuge when invaders came raiding.”
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He’s proper. The outdated temples of Tamil Nadu are a treasure-trove of types incised on stone or magicked from brass, and lavished every day with fruit and flowers, incense and sandalwood, music and lightweight. They entangle divine, human, animal, vegetative, historic and fantastical life into one shapeshifting, passionate pictorial script open to limitless elaboration. This language may also, abruptly, drop a number of octaves into minimalism. In the milling crowds I can inform a follower of Siva from the three horizontal white strains on their brow, and one of Vishnu from two vertical ones, like the finials atop a temple. So easy.
Hinduism is a story faith; its mercurial knowledge is lightened and sweetened by tales, softened by ambiguities, sharpened by paradoxes. In the many legends about Siva and Vishnu portrayed in the temples and re-narrated by Selvam, issues occur in a dimension distinct from historic time. They happen in an everlasting current, as quick as the scorching breath of the cow I feed sheaves of spinach to on a morning stroll in Madurai, as round me scores of ladies stoop over their thresholds making kolams, ornamental patterns, with rice flour.