The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  ‘Where are they going?’ I asked a passer-by, a dark-skinned Keralan in a green lungi.

  ‘To the tank,’ he replied. ‘Once a year the gods are taken from here for a boat ride on the holy waters.’ He added: ‘Every year my friends and I walk here from our village in Kerala just to see this sight.’

  ‘You must have sore feet,’ I said. ‘It’s a long way.’

  ‘We feel happy to come,’ he replied. ‘The goddess gives us strength. Sometimes it takes us only nine days to walk here.’

  ‘To see the Teppam festival brings many boons,’ said the man’s friend, another wiry Keralan. ‘Every year we feel the benefit.’

  ‘And is that why all these people come?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the first pilgrim. ‘This temple is one of the most holy places in India, and this is one of the most auspicious days. On this day, if you ask anything of the goddess you are sure to get success.’

  ‘Is there anything in particular that you will be asking for?’

  ‘We all want children,’ said the first pilgrim. ‘And for this we look to Meenakshi. She has much energy, much power.’

  ‘You have no children?’ I asked.

  ‘I have three sons. But I want six.’

  ‘How many does your wife want?’

  ‘She wants only three. So she has stayed in Kerala.’

  ‘Meenakshi Devi looks after her devotees,’ said the second pilgrim. ‘She is like a mother to us. She gives us energy and strength. She clears obstacles from our path. Just to see her, to have darshan, is enough.’

  We had left the temple behind us and were now heading through the middle of Madurai. The sun had risen and the shopkeepers were beginning to open their stalls: Durga’s Veg and Tiffin; Anand Vests and Briefs; the Bell Brand Umbrella Shop; the Raj Lucky Metal Store. As the streets filled with people, so the procession began to make slower and slower progress. An escort of four fat policemen now led the way, lazily waving their lathis at cyclists who were trying to head against the flow. Every hundred yards or so the raths would pull to a halt and the priests would accept the offerings given to them by the devotees who lined the way, anointing the pilgrims’ heads with vibhuti (ash-powder) and kumkum (the red powder symbolising the sexuality of the goddess), and lighting the lamps on the pilgrims’ outstretched trays of offerings. Those who gave money were blessed by the temple elephant, who first took the rupee notes in its trunk, gave the money to its priestly mahout, then momentarily cupped the tip of its trunk over the devotee’s head.

  In some places little temporary wayside temples had been erected along the route – often little more than trestle tables covered in lamps and framed and garlanded lithographs of gods, goddesses and saints. These were easily confused with the roadside booths set up by the various political parties for the forthcoming election, as both were covered with almost identical sets of images of heroes, political bosses and gods. After all, in India the division between religion and politics is notoriously porous, and with so many gods being played by film stars, and so many film stars entering politics (particularly in the south), there is an easy drift of iconography between temple, silver screen and election rally. Moreover, Meenakshi and Sundareshvara are believed by the people of Madurai to have jointly ruled their town as king and queen in ancient times, so they are themselves in a sense politicians as well as gods. Certainly, at both sets of stalls the procession would halt, garlands would be draped over the Brahmins and the political candidates, and coconuts would be cracked over the rath.

  It was nearly ten o’clock before the procession reached the sacred tank at the edge of town, an open expanse of water with an island temple standing in its middle. Here the golden idols were decanted on to the temple rafts for ferrying around the lake.

  ‘The goddess is having her bath now,’ explained one of the elderly Brahmins as I watched the boat set off around the tank. ‘We should leave her to her privacy. Come back at ten o’clock tonight if you wish to see the climax of the festival.’

  ‘This is our custom,’ said his son, also a temple priest. He was a handsome boy, and but for the sacred thread hanging over his shoulder, was naked from his white lungi upwards. ‘You see, this is a very ancient ceremony,’ he continued. ‘Over two thousand years old.’

  ‘I am the sixty-third generation of temple priests in my family,’ said the father, ‘and my son is the sixty-fourth. These traditions about our goddess have been handed down to us from the most ancient times. The same festivals, the same holidays, are celebrated just as they were at that time.

  ‘Nothing, not one detail,’ he said, ‘has been changed.’

  What the Brahmin said was quite true. The temple at Madurai is contemporary with those of ancient Greece and Egypt, yet while the gods of Thebes and the Parthenon have been dead and forgotten for millennia, the gods and temples of Hindu India are now more revered than ever.

  Hindu civilisation is the only great classical culture to survive intact from the ancient world, and at temples such as Madurai one can still catch glimpses of festivals and practices that were seen by Greek visitors to India long before the rise of ancient Rome. Indeed, it is only when you grasp the astonishing antiquity, and continuity, of Hinduism that you realise quite how miraculous its survival has been.

  Madurai is one of the most ancient holy towns in India, a Benares of the south, and long before its existence was first noted in the West in the fourth century BC, it was already an important centre. For from the very earliest period, Madurai was a major terminus of the Spice Route, linking the pepper groves of India with the groaning tables of the Mediterranean. Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador who visited India in 302 BC, recorded the town’s legendary riches, and it is given pride of place in the earliest document detailing the spice trade, the Periplus Maris Erythraei, written by an anonymous Alexandrian Greek in the first century AD.

  The Periplus gives a wonderful picture of the courtly lifestyle of the time when it records that the area around Madurai imported Mediterranean eye-shadow, perfume, silverware, fine Italian wine and beautiful slave-girl musicians for concubinage; in turn the town exported silk, ivory, pearls and, crucially, pepper. Both Strabo and Ptolemy mention Madurai, the former in the same breath as complaining about the drain of silver from the imperial Roman treasury that the trade with India was causing. This picture is graphically confirmed by the recent find of several huge Roman coin hoards around Madurai, as well as the discovery of a Roman coastal trading post near Pondicherry, where the goods destined for the town were unloaded. At the peak of the trade, during the reign of Nero, an embassy from Madurai was received in Rome, and there is even a reference to a Temple of Augustus being erected on the Indian coast, presumably for the use of Roman traders permanently settled in the Carnatic. Even today the English ‘pepper’ and ‘ginger’ are loan words from Tamil – from ‘pippali’ and ‘singabera’ respectively – having entered our language in the Middle Ages via Byzantine Greek.

  This picture of Madurai’s cosmopolitan connections is confirmed by Tamil sources which record that the kings of the Pandyan dynasty used to keep Yavana (Greek or Roman) mercenaries, alongside a regiment of Tamil Amazons, as their personal bodyguards. We know this because around the temple at Madurai there grew up a flourishing literary culture based, according to tradition, at the Sangam or academy of Tamil poets.

  The surviving work of the Sangam is wonderfully graphic and accessible, and gives a picture of a heroic society that would not have been altogether strange to Homer, Virgil or the author of Beowulf: a world of chariots and warriors where the refusal of one king to give his daughter in marriage to another was a cause for war, and where soldiers, and even their mothers, welcomed death in battle, for such an end led the hero straight to nirvana.

  The wiles of dancing-girls and courtesans is another popular theme. The Shilappadikaram, one of the most famous Sangam works, tells the tragedy of a Prince Kovalan, who neglects his wife and loses his fortune because of his love for the celebrated co
urtesan Madhavi of Puhar; in the end, penniless, Kovalan is accused of theft and cut down in the streets of Madurai, while his faithful wife wreaks revenge by consigning the city to flames.

  Arguably the most beautiful of the poems to emerge from the Sangam is The Garland of Madurai, a celebration of the city’s festivals probably written in the second century AD. One section almost exactly describes the scene I saw seventeen hundred years later: ‘[Madurai is] a city gay with flags, waving over homes and shops selling food and drink; the streets are broad rivers of people, folk of every race, buying and selling in the bazaars, or singing to the music of wandering bands and musicians … [Around the temple], amid the perfume of ghee and incense, [are stalls] selling sweet cakes, garlands of flowers, scented powder and betel paan … [while nearby are] men making bangles of conch shells, goldsmiths, cloth dealers, tailors making up clothes, coppersmiths, flower sellers, vendors of sandlewood, painters and weavers.’

  Both the city and the temple you walk through today retain the configuration described in The Garland, with the streets forming a series of concentric circles around the temple. Although both town and temple have been burned down and rebuilt many times over, and little of the city’s present-day fabric predates the seventeenth century, the plan of Madurai’s centre still corresponds fairly closely to its original classical Hindu design of the mandala, a geometric diagram oriented to the four cardinal directions and symbolising the ideal cosmos, a street plan that in Madurai’s case probably dates from no later than the first century AD.

  Yet perhaps the most extraordinary example of Madurai’s astonishing continuity is the fact that the Sangam poem The Sacred Games of Shiva, which tells the legend of Sundareshvara’s marriage to Meenakshi, is still very much current in the city; so much so that its myths are known to every shopkeeper and rickshaw-driver. Moreover, the events described in the stories of The Sacred Games remain the basis of the city’s calendar, inspiring both the cycle of festivals around which Madurai’s civic life still revolves, and the details of the daily worship inside the temple precincts.

  Meenakshi, then as now, is the city’s great fertility goddess, and the focus of her cult lies in her union with Sundareshvara. Every night in the temple the images of Meenakshi and Sundareshvara are brought together in the latter’s bedchamber. The last act of the priests before they close the doors is to remove Meenakshi’s nose-jewel, lest the rubbing of it irritate her husband when they make love – an act, so the priests will tell you, that ensures the preservation and regeneration of the universe.

  So spectacular and addictive is the love play between the two deities that Sundareshvara – uniquely for a form of that most adulterous god Shiva – remains strictly faithful to his goddess. Once a year, an image of the lovely Tamil goddess Cellattamman is brought to the god ‘to have her powers renewed by Sundareshvara’. But Sundareshvara refuses her, and the spurned goddess returns to her temple in such a fury that she can only be propitiated by a buffalo sacrifice. The Teppam festival which I attended is also related to the goddess’s irresistible sexuality. For Meenakshi’s boat trip with Sundareshvara is understood by the faithful to be part of her seduction of her Lord, a seduction which she finally achieves later that night.

  All this, of course, makes the festival one of the most fecund and auspicious times in the year to get married. On its eve, as I was wandering through the temple precincts, I found myself in a long file of competing marriage parties as village after village queued up to marry off its young. The parties waited, excited and expectant, in the principal ceremonial passage leading to the shrine of Meenakshi. After the rites had been celebrated they retired to the southern range of the cloister surrounding the temple tank, to relax and to remove the more encumbering of their marriage clothes.

  As I watched, a pretty Tamil bride of no more than seventeen entered the cloister surrounded by a gaggle of ten of her girlfriends. They surrounded her on all sides and, holding up an unwound sari, allowed her to remove her garlands and change in privacy out of her heavy red silk marriage sari and in to a less formal cotton one. Other guests appeared carrying the accumulated wedding presents, while to one side, on his own, stood the groom, if anything even younger than his bride, and looking profoundly dazed and uncertain about the day’s events. After some of the older villagers had blessed the couple by touching their feet, the girls led the bride purposefully off. Intrigued, I followed at a discreet distance to see where they were taking her.

  They led her through the temple’s labyrinth of halls and passages, eventually coming to a halt before a carved pillar. The girls bowed before the image, then anointed it with powder from a small pot carried by one of the bride’s friends. After they had gone, I went up to see which god or goddess they had dedicated themselves to. In fact the image was not of a deity, but of some sort of fertility yakshi, a naked, heavy-breasted and heavily pregnant sprite shown bent-legged in the act of giving birth. The entire image glistened with oil where devotees wishing for a child, or an easy delivery, had covered it with ghee, while around the breasts and navel it was heavily stained with vermilion and kumkum.

  Nearby, among the caryatids carved on each of the temple’s ten thousand pillars, I found many other images of fecundity. One, for example, showed a Tamil village woman with a coir shopping basket and a baby strapped to her breast. Her head was turned so she could see a second baby she was carrying in a backpack, while beside her walked a third child, a little boy eating an apple; the women’s hand rested gently on her son’s head. It is an image of startling humanity – the same sight can be seen today in any bazaar in Tamil Nadu – yet the statue predates the beginning of the Italian Renaissance by over a century.

  ‘Just to enter the goddess’s temple brings great good fortune,’ explained K.R. Bhaskar, a tall, dhoti-clad devotee who had come up and introduced himself as I wandered around. ‘Meenakshi ammah certainly blessed my family: we now have two children after coming to pray here.’

  ‘And the villagers believe this? That you only have to come here and children miraculously appear?’

  ‘Not just the villagers,’ replied Mr Bhaskar, ‘the educated class too. I myself am a financial consultant in Bangalore. I have a postgraduate MSc in biochem from Mysore University. But I believe in Meenakshi. This is my sincere feeling. I know she exists. I myself have seen her, in the mist, in shadows. She comes in my dreams, my subconscious. What is going on here is 100 per cent truth.’

  ‘When you say you can see the gods, do you actually believe that they look the way they do in temples, with three faces and six arms and so on.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mr Bhaskar patiently. ‘These things are symbols only. Not all devotees have the same level of spiritual achievement. Some people can see god in a flame when they meditate, but most others need something more concrete, something on which they can focus their devotion. These images here are just indications of the different moods of the gods, mere reflections. They are paths to reach the infinite, not an end in themselves.’

  ‘And do many educated people feel like you?’ I asked.

  ‘Many,’ said Mr Bhaskar. ‘At one time maybe the educated stayed away from the temples, thinking they were backward, but these days educated people are coming back in ever-increasing numbers. You see, this is not superstition. This is our culture. It is in our blood, in our veins. It is not so much a religion as a way of life. It is not something that will stop when our people are educated. Hinduism will never die. Already it is beginning to make a comeback in our India.’

  ‘Why do you think that is?’ I asked.

  ‘When you come to the temple you feel total peace of mind,’ said Mr Bhaskar. ‘You feel total involvement in the spiritual powers of God. In Bangalore many people have made much money, but they found that this did not satisfy them. It was not enough.

  ‘Only with faith in God,’ said Mr Bhaskar, ‘can they have full satisfaction.’

  The next evening at ten o’clock I again made my way along the dusty, pilgrim-clo
gged streets of Madurai, and through the labyrinth of horn-hooting, rickshaw-squealing lanes leading up to the great sacred tank.

  Everything had been transformed since the morning procession. Temple bells rang out over a hot, thick blanket of darkness, lit here and there by the naked electric lights of the tea-stalls and the flickering camphor flames of the pilgrims’ lamps. Around the side of the tank the crowds were massing, all dressed up in their neatly-pressed new lungis and their best silk saris. Some sat up on the parapet, nibbling from cones of chickpeas and roasted dal, while all around them balloon-sellers and ice-cream wallahs, peanut-roasters and sweetmeat vendors sold their wares. Here and there, among the sea of milling pilgrims and townsfolk, stood crowded bullock carts full of families who had driven in from their villages to see the festival: burly, moustachioed farmers and their womenfolk and children. From their eminence they peered eagerly over the heads of the crowd towards the illuminated spire of the island temple rising in to the sky, its image perfectly reflected in the still waters of the tank.

  ‘We come for every festival,’ said Pandyan, a farmer sitting in the front of one especially-heavily laden cart, bearing no fewer than fifteen women and children from his extended family. ‘Our village is only twenty kilometres away, so if all goes well we can get back home before dawn.’

  ‘In our village we have a small temple to Meenakshi,’ said Pandyan’s wife, Kasi Ama. ‘But it is better to come and give our offerings to her here.’