A South Indian Journey

by Michael Wood

  It is easy to sit for hours here and watch the world go by, the ebb and flow of visitors, the ritual cycle of the temple’s day. Or to wander the corridors and subsidiary shrines; outside the door of the Siva shrine, for example, is a little group of altars to the planets; oil-lamps burn from dawn till night dripping fire on to the stones, and pilgrims are constantly moving past them. At a huge, pot-bellied Ganesh devotees leave sticky sweets and pray for good luck. There are shrines to the legendary Sangam poets; there is even the preserved trunk of the kadamba tree where the temple was founded in mythic times (rather as in classical Greek times the stump of Athena’s olive was preserved along with her archaic statue in the Erechtheion at Athens). And all through these spaces lamps burn and pilgrims congregate, mill around, pray and perform their own intimate rituals with a bewildering variety of gesture and movement. Tapping the forehead with the knuckles, smacking cheeks in a kind of chastisement, holding the hands above the head, pirouetting, bowing, prostrating: the halls echoing all day with the susurration of a thousand private prayers.

  But we had no time to wander. Mr Ramasamy’s timetable admitted no slack: our Darshan Video Bus tour had to get to Palani by early evening, so for us it was straight to the goddess. Mala led the way, through the inner gates, framed by a huge metal arch holding a thousand oil-lamps, which are lit at festival time, so that the pilgrim passes through a gateway of fire. We walked past the lotus tank, along a spacious and airy sunlit arcade to the Kili Kudumandapa which lies outside the goddess’s shrine, a space with an elaborately painted roof supported by rows of pillars carved with roaring lion-like creatures with their tails in their mouths. Outside the door is a Nandi and a big painted kolam on the floor like an intricate geometrical pattern, and a circular lotus mandala in a square frame inlaid in the floor; here many devotees prostrate themselves before going in. To one side is a row of shrines with parrot cages. (Goddesses in the south are often shown with parrots, but the parrot is Minakshi’s particular emblem: they are held to signify peace and happiness. Until fairly recently the temple kept real parrots, which were taught to speak the deity’s name: this was discontinued, according to Mr Ramasamy, because of ‘maintenance problems’.) Above the door there is a big illuminated sign identifying this as the goddess’s domain, and only Hindus may go beyond the threshold. Mala explained my presence to the guardian on the door and after some discussion with my fellow travellers I was allowed through.

  *

  When you go through the door the echoing sounds of the exterior world are left behind, daylight lost. You have moved literally and figuratively to an inner world, the antithesis of all that lies outside the door: peace. Where Rameshwaram was riotous noise and confusion, the atmosphere here was quite different, and for this obviously the pilgrims were responsible. There was a warm hush of expectation, a suspension of reality and the projection instead of a land of dreams. You go under an early-thirteenth-century gateway into a large chamber lined by a double row of columns, with brackets holding up the stone slabs of the roof. This is the outer of two enclosures which surround the goddess’s sanctum; it is a spacious columned walkway circling the inner shrine, allowing circulation of air in the stifling interior. In front is the gilt and brass flagstaff of the goddess, where her long linen flag is raised at festival time; on either side of the stairs up into the inner area are shrines to Ganesh and Murugan, the two sons of Siva by the goddess, emphasizing that Minakshi is another form of Parvati. On the inner wall to the left you see a group of plaster images of the temple’s great benefactor the Nayak king Tirumala Nayak and his two queens, in painted stucco, sensuous and pot-bellied; he was a patron of gunpowder and sandal, sponsor of dancing girls and gladiators, protagonist of the beautiful but violent world which was seventeenth-century Tamil Nadu on the eve of the European invasion.

  We circled the corridor and then, coming back to the front, entered the inner enclosure, up the front stairs, through a door flanked by two copper gatekeepers. You step into a darkened inner chamber built in the fifteenth century, in which the goddess chamber stands. This is the most atmospheric part of the temple, despite the neon strip lights. In front of the goddess’s shrine the roof is held up by forty granite columns which are covered with chased copper. The room is lit only by artificial light, and the effect is very striking, fire glittering on surfaces of metal – especially when the temple is open at night for special pujas, on eclipses, and full moons. Counting inwards from the old walls you have now passed through four concentric rings of processional streets, and four rectangular enclosures within the temple: in other words, a kind of huge man-made mandala, a vestige of the ancient city planners.

  Now we were in the heart of the labyrinth. In front of us was a stone chamber fifty feet long by twenty-five wide, ‘the womb chamber’ in whose rear part the immovable image of the goddess is fixed. The sanctum, which only the priests may enter, is raised by three steps above the floor of the inner court. The pilgrims wait below the steps on either side of the rail, the nearest fifty feet or so from the image. The goddess stands in a narrow corridor of darkness, lit by hanging oil-lamps, and by a ring of lamps behind a horn aureole on the back wall like a circle of stars, creating the strange effect of limitless space in the darkness behind the image. Only when the priests do puja and hold fire before her is her face dimly lit in the flickering flames.

  In the womb chamber the pilgrims come face to face with the image which is their goal. It is a human image, much more personalized and specific than the aniconic linga. Here the transaction is with another person, albeit divine. This is what we in the West call idol worship. Better though to quarry its original meaning in the Greek: eidolon means ‘something seen’, whether concrete or phantasmal, and hence a material image which evokes a shared imaginal world in the minds of those who see.

  The image of the goddess is a little smaller than lifesize, her skin of green stone (emerald according to more than one pilgrim I spoke to, but probably green porphyry mined in the hills north of the city). She stands in contrapposto, right leg slightly bent at the knee so that the left hip is accentuated, emphasizing her procreative powers. She is crowned, and though the statue as carved is clothed – as are the bronzes – she is always dressed in a real robe too. Her costume changes each day; she wears a white sari at night to symbolize the retention of her sexual powers, and red during the day, signifying blood, the colour of female potency, so that she is charged with the aura of sex and fecundity. In one festival in particular, Navaratri, different symbolic meanings are expressed by costume shifts and liturgies on each of the nine days. She holds a parrot and a bouquet, ‘radiating love and compassion’ as the local guidebook for pilgrims puts it.

  At the rail Mr Ramasamy, Mrs Vaideyen and Mala lean forward, craning to see; Mala strikes her cheeks, right with left hand, left with right. As the Brahmin comes along the rail with the tray bearing camphor names and ash, she drops a few paise on to the tray in return for ash and daubs her forehead with it. (The scented whitish ash which comes from the camphor flame is the colour of the god; the vermilion dot seen on Indian women’s foreheads the world over is the colour of the goddess.) Then she resumes her fixed concentration on the image and completes her prayer. There was a kind of urgency to the action, especially a pressing need to see the face – virtus comes from the face and specifically from the eyes. Darshan, the act of worship, means ‘seeing’.

  There was a hush as they stared into the black chamber: the nickering flames of the puja lamps caused the air to quiver in the hot airless room; a smell of sweat and incense; stillness. As the atmosphere seemed to vibrate in front of my eyes, I had the uncanny sense that the statue was moving; it was as if the pilgrims’ love had infused the image with life.

  (‘Senses stilled and indrawn,’ says the famous Tamil poem by Tirumullar, which is known to all the pilgrims. ‘Surrender to the Beloved is as when a man and a woman lie together in embrace and loving caress. When that becomes this then you will find peace and bliss.’ Havi
ng nothing from my own culture with which to compare, at that moment I found” myself thinking of the strange story of The Winter’s Tale, in which, in a mysterious lamplit shrine, the statue of a mother is brought back to life by the faith of her lost daughter and her grieving husband. How very Indian, Shakespeare’s strange puja in that late romance.)

  The Madurai temple legend according to Mala is this: Minakshi, the daughter of the Pandyan king, is born deformed, with three nipples. She is told that when she sees her future husband the blemish will be removed. She becomes queen of the Pandyas, but she is an Amazonian, wielding spear, bow and chariot, conquering her male enemies; ruling and acting as a man. Then, on Kailash, as promised, she has a vision of Siva and is restored. In fact she is none other than an incarnation of Parvati, the embodiment of auspiciousness within marriage. She returns to Madurai to dwell in the temple and hears the appeals of the childless and blesses their future offspring. Married into the Brahminical pantheon, but a Dravidian warrior queen, she retains a strange status, which is summed up in her role in the temple. She has primacy in the cult, she is worshipped first, before the male god and stands apart from him. Having been self-created in the sacrificial fire, she passes from being the Amazonian three-breasted queen who led armies and ruled as a man, to being the epitome of domesticated femininity, married and a mother. But she is none the less the independent mistress of the shrine. Her role in the year’s festivals reminds the pilgrims of her more dangerous side; and she always stands alone to receive her pilgrims, not as an appendage of the male god. Mr Ramasamy had something to say about this.

  ‘We have a saying in Tamil Nadu,’ said Mr Ramasamy; ‘In a marriage you either have a Madurai house or a Chidambaram house.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘If it is a Madurai house, the lady is wearing the trousers.’

  ‘Which one do you have, Mr Ramasamy?’

  ‘Well, we live in Chidambaram, but reverence Minakshi. Ideal balance.’

  Mrs Ramasamy raised her eyebrows with a twinkle.

  When we left, big mirrors in the roof above the door enabled the pilgrims to see the goddess still above the crush, to glimpse her image behind them as they walked away. At the door Mala turned again, standing on tiptoe, to look one last time, saying goodbye. Like a child, or a lover.

  On the way out near the door there is one last image at which the women pray: a simple crude stone relief carved on a column. It shows the goddess as the Earth Mother; it is an image prayed to especially by women hoping for children. Big-legged and round-bellied, she stands naked, legs akimbo, while her female essence is drunk from her yoni by a tiny male devotee; the whole pillar is smeared in kun kum, and glistens blood red in the semi-darkness. The Tamils believe the life juice is possessed in much greater quantity, and more potently, by women than men. Like the ancient Greeks, they think that women’s sexual power is much greater than men’s, and hence it is vital in seeking a partner in marriage that the horoscope shows the right balance of attributes. Preferably the man should be some years older than the woman, for in all things – age, personality, caste, physical attributes, sexual appetite and proclivity – a mismatch is destructive to the male. Visceral and unambiguous, this image is the very symbol of tantric religion, a literal representation of the force which through its long history India has assigned to Sakti.

  I was fascinated by our encounter with the goddess. It felt like meeting someone once known but long forgotten. Aphrodite, Artemis, Athena, Demeter, Persephone, Nut, Isis, Ishtar. We know their names and attributes but we meet them only in the residue of their aura, in books, paintings, symbols, and in archaeological monuments. We try to trace her epiphanies in broken Greek majuscule at Eleusis, or on the starry zodiac of Dendera where her genitals and breasts have been gouged by Christian fanatics. We stand uncomprehendingly before the black-faced, gilded Diana in Naples, her neck hung with bulls’ testicles; we confront Ishtar’s haunting visage in Baghdad, she who knew ‘the rules of the underworld’. But to meet her living incarnation was, to say the least, exciting. Nowhere on earth as in India is the goddess worshipped in such splendour. There is an archaic, irrepressible current in Indian life which has never been done away with by the westernization or modernization of our own times.

  We walked back outside into the blinding glare of the sun. By the tank, I talked to Mala while her neighbours, packed holy ash into their bags. Everyone was satisfied: it was as if they had taken food or drink. I pondered this as we ate that lunch time in the crowded Sree Ganesh mess: a dank subterranean place, friendly and overcrowded, which served the office population near the West Gate.

  I asked the women about Minakshi’s eyes: Why does she have ‘fish eyes’? Beautiful women’s eyes are like a carp, they said, ‘long and shapely as a fish’. Also fishes’ eyes are round and unblinking, to look at they are liquid and glitter. (This is an ancient semantic cluster in Tamil, for the word min is the root of both fish and star; originally perhaps meaning to shine, it probably comes from the most archaic stratum of the language, for this combination of fish and star occurs on the pottery of the Indus civilization.) Someone also mentioned an old folk belief that fishes have the power to hatch their eggs by a mere look. Today in Tamil Nadu, they said, there are many popular stories about the fatal power of the glance: between men and women a glance is said to be almost as significant as the loss of chastity. Eyes, like sex ”organs, contain love: ‘Love at first sight,’ we say. Souls are said to mix through the eyes – to my mind a true insight into the overriding power of physical attraction in choosing a partner and falling in love.

  Mala said that this is what should happen in an arranged marriage when you meet the prospective husband or wife. The horoscope may be right, but if you don’t have the feeling through the eyes, then you should seek elsewhere. Sarasu, for example, had been looking for two years now; some of her suitors had been perfectly compatible, but she had felt nothing looking into their eyes. One of her friends added the popular etymology of the word for husband in Tamil, kanauar, as lean, ‘eye’ and avar, ‘he’, that is, ‘the one to whom the eyes go’ or ‘are given’. The first sight of the potential wife or husband has the kind of resonance of darshan: a recognition, a powerful encounter involving the exchange of spiritual and sexual power (as real darshan is with the goddess). ‘You see,’ said Mrs Vaideyen, ‘when Sita and Rama meet and fall in love, Kampan says their eyes met and a shaft of love entered her which later expanded and spread into her whole being. He invaded her heart, she said.’

  With its grandly conceived annual ritual cycle and its great festivals, with its simple daily round of pujas, music and sacramental meals, Madurai reminds you that very simple rituals, by their beauty and antiquity, have the power to satisfy everyone, not merely the gullible and the illiterate. It is a mnemonic of a culture: a focal point, a crossing place, as the tax inspector had said. Behind the so-called idol lies the mental image: an imaginal world and a whole culture. It is not only, or even chiefly, about belief, but about being Tamil. In Western culture, Isocrates thought the mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis the most important legacy of the Greeks, for such things connect both with the whole body of myth and with social belief as well. At Madurai I felt myself in presence of (as Quintilian said of the Greek gods) ‘things which never were but are always.’

  THE HILL OF PALANI

  ‘Now you can see the hill, Mr Michael,’ said Mr Ramasamy, shouting from the front of the bus. I jerked awake; the afternoon heat on the bus had been stupefying. It was now five. We had bypassed the rock of Dindigul, through Virupakshi, and entered a great bowl of wooded hills cut by deep valleys ahead. Rising up on the left were the cloud-topped foothills of the Western Ghats, the great massif of the Kodaikanal hills. Mr Ramasamy was excited. The last goal of our pilgrimage was in sight. ‘There, there, see now. You see the hill? It is one of the most charming places in all of Tamil Nadu.’

  We were at the edge of a great lake, the Vyapuri, looking across it towards the mouth
s of two big valleys separated by dramatic cliffs, their pale ochre crags boldly etched by the sinking sun. Framing the eastern side of this beautiful prospect rises the steep rocky hill of Palani, a perfect dome 450 feet high, not unlike the Acropolis of Athens. On top is the famous shrine of Murugan, squat and flat, with red and white striped outer walls and a small gopura on the west. Below it you could see the sacred way which winds round the base of the hill, lined with shrines and choultries, and the wide stone staircase which climbs up the hillside to the summit.

  As dusk comes on lamps are lit all the way up these paths, giving the impression of a hill draped in a garland of fairy lights. The natural setting was indeed, as Mr Ramasamy had said, quite charming. More than that, though, the surrounding bowl of hills lent an added majesty to the mysterious shrine on the summit; it was not a place to be passed through, or casually stumbled upon, but must be deliberately sought out in its mountain lair. Celebrated two thousand years ago in Sangam poetry, it is another tap root of Tamil culture. In the evening light of a quiet October day, across the rich cultivated plain, the green rice fields, the groves of palms and the vast silent range, it was a memorable sight, and the spirits of everyone on the bus visibly lifted with anticipation.

  Like Lourdes, Palani is an out-and-out pilgrimage town. The mile-long road from the station to the foot of the hill winds through the town, round temples and shops and food stalls. There are hostels, choultries and lodges for the thousands who come in each day for a short stay: these are owned by different temple bodies, caste associations from all over the south. I strolled into the Sri Venkateshwara lodge to use their bathroom; it was a vast barracks painted bright green, the front hung with banana leaves and palm fronds for the festival; the foyer was heavy with the smell of Mysore incense and disinfectant. The place was crowded and buzzing with excitement, officious managers, booking clerks, and catering officers rushing to and fro. The whole town seemed to be geared to servicing the shrine. As you neared the foot of the hill, the religious buildings crowded the road: washing places, cloakrooms, left-luggage halls, hostels. We parked near the bus stand: