Temples of Tamilnad: Travels in South India

By James Hurd

"Temples of Tamilnad" takes us to the Tamil-speaking countryside of South India, to a collection of temples each remarkable for its veneration of the major gods of the Hindu pantheon, Vishnu and Siva. They often appear in one of their many incarnations, some with a quaint but unhelpful Dravidian name. The gods and their consorts (Parvati, Lakshmi, Kali, etc.)filter through our imagination until they become part of our lives, or perhaps even of ourselves. And in the temple sanctum the most powerful deity may be represented simply by air, water, a flame or shadow of a stone. All this to music and splitting of coconuts! Perplexing? Yes: Paradoxes abound. Puzzling? No: Enthralling, I found.

This is why we venture to Tirvannamalai, Chidambaran and Tanjore. Do you prefer blue fluting Krishna or twirling Nataraja, the dancer, or disastrous Kali with her string of skulls? Secure on their lotus pedestals they await us as they have since time began.

The author of this light-hearted account, a mid-career diplomat in search of wide horizons, admits some of the temples are musty, with a few lonely scorpions in the upper gopurans. Fortunately, there are friends, guides and companions to ward off anxious moments. Then, to leaven the text, you will find the inclusion of some early Tamil poems, alive and startling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 8, 2010
• ISBN: 9781465319210

James Hurd

James Hurd, born in New York City, attended Yale (BA) and Johns Hopkins (MA). He was at sea for three years on destroyers in World War II before joining the Foreign Service. After posts in London, Washington and Singapore, he decided it was time for a change. This resulted in a year's sabbatical in South India which became the basis of this book. At about this time, another book, "Preludes and Other Poems," was published in London by Christopher Johnson. On return to the State Department, the author specialized in public and cultural affairs, speech writing and dealing with international expositions. For the latter he received a superior honor award. The author spent several years' part-time work with the homeless in D.C., where he and his wife live.

Book preview

TEMPLES OF

TAMILNAD

Travels in South India

James Hurd

Copyright © 2010 by James Hurd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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19753

Contents

Preface

THE LONG HISTORY OF TAMIL POEMS

I

II

Tamil Poems I

A DUN COW FALLEN

IF PASSION SHOULD PASS

DROWSY MIDNIGHT ELEPHANT

SEASHORE MAN

THE THIEF WAS THERE

III

IV

V

Tamil Poems II

GODDESS OF CHASTE WIVES

WHEN THE TUFTED COCK CALLS

THE SCATTER OF FINE DUST

O WISHFUL HEART

AY: HIS HILL

VI

VII

VIII

Tamil Poems III

THE SHARP GLORY OF A GOLDSMITH’S NAIL

I’M BURNING

MIDNIGHT TRYST: FIASCO

CHARMER TURNED ASCETIC

ELEGY: BRIGHT BURNING PYRE

IX

POSTSCRIPT

PHOTOGRAPHS

Endnotes

Preface

This book does not lead us to a temple for a discussion of church doctrine. I think of it more as a spiritual journey, or process, through which we appreciate the beauty of moonlight on the shore pagoda while learning some fundamentals of the Hindu faith.

As part of this vision, Temples of Tamilnad—Travels through South India leads the way across the Tamil-speaking part of the South to visit some remarkable Hindu temples found along a hundred miles of Coromandel coast south of Madras. Antique and to some degree beautiful (circa 800-1850 AD), they venerate major deities of the Hindu pantheon such as Vishnu and Siva, and consorts Parvati, Lakshmi and the illustrious but elusive Kali. A small point: In chapter V, I describe conversations with several deities, or gods. Later, I discussed this with three friends, Brahmin guides including Rajiv. They said, If this seems real, it must be true, but only in your mind. So be it.

* * *

With many new names and faces as part of my work as well as older myths and realities, I spent as much time as possible, concentrating on readings from the Hindu classics* to clear my mind.

With such a ferment of ideas in the air, I felt assured to know that all these impulses would be slowly filtered through the imagination until they became part of our lives, even of ourselves.

* * *

I was working late when word came through some friends that visitors would arrive the next day. We were almost on the move. I cut myself a sandwich, quaffed a bitter ale, and fell fast asleep ready for Temples and Tigers in the morning.

Regards, J. H.

With love for Nancy, Mimi, Jim,

and Christopher.

In memory of Edwin D. Morgan (1921-2001)

"If I take the wings of the morning,

and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea …"

Psalm 139

With deep appreciation for Anita Weisburger’s deft and highly professional typing the manuscript of multiple redrafts of this book with infectious good humor. Also, compliments to Melancthon Hurd for her critical insights and for drawing the map of South India.

The author wishes to thank E. J. Applewhite and John Gleiber and Joseph McCrindle for subtle forms of encouragement which spurred him to finish the book.

I thank Emmanuel Larmie for coming to stand in, and to help with revisions in a very able manner.

THE LONG HISTORY OF TAMIL POEMS

Readers will find between a few chapters of this book a selection of early Tamil poems¹ from the first five centuries AD. They represent a flowering of Dravidian culture along the Coromandel. originally culled from papyrus leaf into print, they have been translated and edited as prose-poems² by the late Hindu scholar, A.K. Ramanujan. Searching back lo these several (1500) years, these quiet poems startle us by the manner in which they are poignantly alive.

This literary tradition continued steadily, evolving in the 8th-12th centuries with the dramatic appearance of the Tamil troubadours. The Tamil sense of the sacred, of what was immanent in places and things, then led to the building of the great temples of the South.

The troubadours were the poet-saints of their time. They lived in a surprisingly diverse society, with warrior-kings, farmers and fishermen, men and women of the hills, and men of the cactus desert.

Some of these poems are amorous. But the Tamil saints held all life firmly in their gaze. Wanton or wondrous? Perhaps they stand as a distant mirror-image of their time.

Image434.JPG

MAP OF SOUTH INDIA

I

Arrivals

On my first night on the Bombay-Madras train, songs of soldiers drifted from the car ahead as, for the first time since we left the coast, it strained at its task of drawing us across the hills. The singing went on for hours, until the chants and choruses faded, until finally the voices—and audience—died away in sleep.

It was not quite 6 a.m. when I awoke and found we were running over silent downs, the rhythm of wheels echoing through the compartments. I thought back to the darkness of London at this hour, midnight there with Big Ben a substitute moon through the lacework of trees in St. James’ Park. And as I mused, I found myself spectator to mysteries of the sun, a mountain of fire that spilled over the rim of the Deccan.

How it burned, balancing on the horizon until its brilliance was a thousand-fold reflected in its halo! Then it was aloft in such a frenzy of light that shadows shot like arms from the white-washed Hindu temple flashing by in the foreground.

We were crossing a branch of the sacred River Kistna into the Raichur Doab, threading our way through villages still festooned with the gaiety of Devali, the yearly festival of lights. In the quiet of the compartment I found myself considering the naturalness of reverence for the sun, and the intricacies of ritual through which Hindus, exemplified by the Brahmin beside me performing Sandhya-vandanam, express this. One salutes the sun rising on a world of less orderly bodies and gives thanks for the continued breath of life in transitory forms. Thus external acts of worship which appear unnecessary to the observer provide a bridge into perceptions of the spirit. A few lines from Chuang Tzu (365-290 B.C.),

"The work of the ear ends with hearing,

The work of the mind ends with ideas,

But the spirit is an emptiness

Ready to take in all things,"

seemed immediately applicable to the little I knew of India.

After another hour I thought about food and was delighted, when we stopped at Guntakal, to have my senses assaulted by the variety of life on the railway platform. These ordinary sights have been carefully set down by many travelers. But they were combined with an urgency of expression—as train officials, bearers, Sikhs, coolies, tonga-wallahs, children and passengers brushed by—that gave promise of a full year ahead. In the morning light there was evidence that the deceptive pungencies of the subcontinent were to be well represented. And from an air-conditioned car hooked on behind I could hear the crash of crockery and patter of escaping feet as a European voice—I imagined with moustache—rose to full pitch, coloring the scene with indignation.

No, no, you idiot! Not just fruit and tea. I ordered eggs, poached eggs on toast, poached, POACHED eggs! Do you understand?

There were other pauses during the day as the train continued its route from the sharp western ghats we had climbed after leaving Bombay the afternoon before, through Kondapuram and along the Pennar River. Here our attentions were drawn from dusty Vijayanagar landscapes to the ablutions of water buffaloes dousing their dark and coral underbodies in its current, or relaxing to such an extent that only the protrusion of alarmingly pink nostrils gave evidence of the solemn shapes beneath. I also noted wading paddy birds, white, questioning egrets similar to those along the Nile, maintaining the tranquility of nature while young boys sported on the banks.

A watery chicken curry was brought on board for lunch. I shared it with a Lebanese merchant, from Nabatiye, in the south,

I think he said, who had spent the morning pacing the floor in gravy-stained pajamas. He wore a money belt, on the diagonal like a holster, and kept scratching his hair so that dandruff fell like a drift of unseasonable snow onto the wooden seats. A man of few words and belches, he disposed of the curry and offered me the remnant of a custard, which the railway catering system had been dishing up, according to some Victorian formula, for a hundred years.

The afternoon wore on at a slow pace. We were salted away like fish being sent to market with barely enough room, or air, for conversation. There was, of course, room for reflection. Where better a place? I said to myself, thinking of the travels of Odysseus and his visit with the Lotophagii, those creatures in whom lotus wine induced forgetfulness. This flower, so recurrent a theme in civilizations as diverse as those of China and Egypt, came into focus as being peculiarly Indian.

It is associated with Hindu gods at their birth, if the infinity of time allows for any beginning, when Brahma was wafted on a lotus from Narayana’s navel. This is the pink lotus of the creator, unfolding in sunlight. There is also the blue lotus of Vishnu, the preserver, reflecting an azure sky. The blossoms accompany the gods in procession and, like our pond lilies in America, rustle as the breeze sweeps through them. In India they decorate the tanks, or holy bathing pools, on one’s approach to the temple. The lotus theme is repeated inside, in the ornamentation of courts and towers. And as for temples, where in the world is there such a fascinating collection as in the Hindu south? Mahabalipuram, Madurai and Tanjore were a few places I had in mind. Even they would be only a beginning.

The lotus, whether carried as symbolic decoration or located underfoot, radiates from images of Hindu gods, describes the shape of sun windows and reappears as the lotus mudra, or cupped gesture of the fingers, by those who meditate or in dance preserve the exacting postures of Bharata Natyam.

They lie against garden walls, gazing at one—in V.S. Prichett phrase—with the self-possession of nudes by Botticelli."

There is, finally, the lotus base on which these images are set. The finest figures, cast in bronze in the classical Chola age of the 8th-12th centuries, come from Tanjore.

I was clearly right in heading south from Bombay, into as much dirt, dust, death and dung as one may find anywhere in the world if that is one’s inclination. But even dung, or camelthorn, makes a warming fire.

I saw the lotus pedestal, as the Brahmin beside me hitched his sacred thread over one ear so as not to disturb his afternoon nap, supporting the third of the Hindu trinity: Siva, favorite of the south, the ambivalent lord of death who destroys, or, by resisting the impulse, dignifies and preserves. The pedestal became a step one made, as over the sill of a door, into the compressed subtlety of South India. The lotus door then came to mind as a theme around which might be built the residency of a year.

Before dark we wound through the abrupt Seshachalam range and stopped a few miles from Tirumalai, with its seven hill pagodas surrounded by both the obscurities of history and a belt of mango, tamarind and sandalwood trees. A three-minute stop, just time for a bowl of curd, and we were off across the low eastern plain. Ahead of us, another hour’s ride to the Bay of Bengal, lay what had been described to me as a small, sequestered, backwater of Dravidian heritage.

* * *

Madras, like other Asian cities with populations of more than a million, is certainly not small. The buildings, with the exception of an upright, commercial cluster in Georgetown, spread out so unobtrusively for miles that it is always people, rather than constructions, of which one is conscious. They are projected on one’s vision by an intensity of light, which, like the winding of a sari between gold borders, emphasizes every detail. They form a kaleidoscope of color and movement. There is a mixture of occupations—flower and spice vendors, ghee and diamond merchants, doctors of law and Ayurveda, beggars, astrologers, strolling musicians, yogis and office peons—and mixtures of family names which derive from Aiyar, Iyengar, Mudaliar, or Naydu communities. There is also the swarming bowl of South Indian tongues, spiced with Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, Anglo-Indian, and true or bastard-Balliol accents. All these, differing by emphasis within provinces, are threaded with French, Dutch and occasional Burmese expletives. Whether in native dress or lavender sharkskin suits with wild lapels, the shapes are so defined by sunlight as almost to make a nonsense of clothing. Everything is visible.

It is a dream world frozen in the grip of so many realities—demands, debts and ironies of circumstance—that alternatives seldom exist. It impoverishes the imagination; the assaults of history come bang up against the anachronisms of modern life. You have mossy shutters dramatized by neon, Coca-Cola bottle caps and rags traded by beggars, blue and gold super uterine tonic advertisements, and cardboard briefcases bulging with mangos, yoga posture charts and steam turbine specifications. The old wine fermenting in so many new bottles. Through it all one senses a people trying to get one step ahead of the present instead of being pinned against a curve. Add to this too much wind or heat. Mix with a population increasing as quickly as grains of corn exploding in a pot. Stir with pride, too much ambition or disillusion. And blend together with a compulsion to weigh and exchange words in the rich agglutinating brew of Tamil—to declaim, adjudicate, categorize, reappraise. In short, to simplify life by making it more complex.

In America, people bump into each other, smile and move on. But in India, where life certainly is more crowded, people slide by. More preoccupied, more scowling, but touching rather than bumping. Interweaving and, like a thread, becoming part of a procession. We are figures on a frieze, a Hindu remarked, almost transparent physically but with wonderfully opaque minds. We hurry on, he said, making the point that Asia is more restless, less easily satisfied than America. Gesturing, adjusting sun glasses, expectorating—with Rorschach blots of betel growing like clouds of madder-colored dust on the pavement—shaking out umbrellas and jumping off buses.

Some finely resolved, guardian heads, like El Greco’s saints in Toledo, float through the crowd. But they are the odd smiles in a forest of hunger, surrounded by faces that remind one more of Modigliani; faces set on strange necks, expressions of protest which have long since ebbed into resignation.

Shadows coil underfoot. Gay and grave notes, like bells and pomegranates decorating priestly cloth, sound on every hand.

I had come to India, to the sequestered south, to visit places generally overlooked and to try and disentangle some of the shadows. By profession a civil servant, I had decided, after seven years’ work in Washington, London and Singapore, to take a sabbatical year off. It was time for a change.

It was from this background that the absorbing year of 19551956 emerged. Its roots went back to visits in the north several years before, to side trips through the dissimilar cities of India’s neighbors on the east, and to long nights of conversation with my wife who, with two small children, was following by sea. With them in mind, let me