THE god was ready for his night of conjugal bliss. The priests of the temple, muscular, shirtless men with white sarongs wrapped around their thighs, bore the god’s palanquin on their shoulders. They marched him slowly along a stone corridor shrouded in shadows to his consort’s shrine. Drumbeats echoed along the walls. Candles flickered outside the doorway to the shrine’s inner sanctum. There, Meenakshi, the fish-eyed goddess, awaited the embrace of her husband, Sundareshwarar, an incarnation of that most priapic of Indian gods, Shiva.India Travel GuideGo to the India Travel Guide »MultimediaSlide ShowIn Tamil Nadu, Gods Live in Stone Temples MapTamil Nadu
Along with hundreds of Indians clustered around the shrine entrance, I strained to get a glimpse of the statue of Sundareshwarar, but green cloths draped over the palanquin kept it hidden. Worshipers surged forward in mass delirium, snapping photos with their cellphones, bowing to the palanquin and chanting hymns. They stretched out their hands to touch the carriage. Priests ordered them back.
Then the priests veered into the inner sanctum, carrying the unseen god toward the eager arms of his wife. They too had a night of divine pleasure ahead of them, so we were all ushered out as the guards began locking up.
This union of Meenakshi and Sundareshwarar is a nightly ritual in Madurai, the largest temple city in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, drawing feverish crowds of Hindu devotees. In much of India, the gods are not creatures of distant myth to be worshiped as abstractions. They exist in our world, in our time, and are fully integrated into the daily lives of Hindu believers. They move simultaneously through the world of the divine and the world that we inhabit, and are subject to all the emotions and experiences that we humans are all too familiar with — including carnal desire.
Few things in India express the continuous presence of the gods better than the ancient, massive temple complexes of Tamil Nadu. Walk through any city there and what catches your eye first are the soaring temple entrances known as gopuras, sacred skyscrapers decorated with a phantasmagoria of Hindu statues of multi-armed, bug-eyed gods, mythical beasts and chiseled warriors. Thousands of such statues adorn the largest gopuras, like the ones rising from the Meenakshi-Sundareshwarar temple in Madurai, one of the holiest pilgrimage sites in India.
“Here, we have a proverb: ‘Where there is a temple, people can live,’ ” said Ram Kumar, a guide I had hired in Madurai. “The temple is the center of a person’s living space.”
Though Kerala, the state just to the west, draws larger tourist crowds, Tamil Nadu is an increasingly popular destination. One of India’s most developed states, it also has beaches and lush farmland, and its cuisine is among the most flavorful — and hottest — in India.
But it is the temple circuit that is the main draw, as it has been for centuries. Indeed, many of Tamil Nadu’s residents see the state as a repository of “pure” Hindu culture. In many ways, it is a country within a country, proudly preserving its ancient Dravidian culture, most noticeably in the widespread use of the Tamil language.
I had been to India four times, but never to the south, so I had little idea of what to expect in December, when I flew with my friend Tini into Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. We were met by a driver from a hotel in Mahabalipuram, a beach town 36 miles south. He whisked us into an Ambassador, those grand 1950s-style sedans ubiquitous throughout India, and off we went, veering past cows, motor rickshaws and overcrowded buses.
The chaos of India — sometimes the very quality that draws me there — wasn’t quite what I needed on this vacation. For a moment, as we were flying through the insane traffic, I had second thoughts about the whole trip.
Then we pulled into Mahabalipuram; I could see the ocean as we cruised into town. There was the smell of salt in the air, and we drove through quiet lanes to the seaside hotel. The beach there is not of the golden-sand-and-swaying-palms kind you find in Goa or Kerala, but it is a pretty stretch to walk along and unwind from sightseeing (think fishing skiffs and seafood restaurants).
It is the town’s stone architecture, some of the oldest in India, that makes Mahabalipuram a good first stop on the temple crawl. Biking between temples seemed the most relaxed way of taking in the sights, so off we went to a set of mini-temples on the southern edge of town. The place was already crowded with Indian tourists and juice vendors standing next to carts piled high with green coconuts.
The ancient site was designed to be a big outdoor showroom that exhibited the skills of the town’s architects. Incredibly, the set of temples, the Five Rathas, was carved from a single large slab of granite: models in the Dravida style.
As I pedaled north, I heard the chiseling of stone coming from roadside workshops — a sound I would hear throughout the day — reminding me that Mahabalipuram is still the stone-sculpturing capital of India, just as it was in ancient times. Likenesses of major Hindu gods like Shiva, Vishnu and Ganesh roll out of these workshops and into homes and offices around the country.
Along with hundreds of Indians clustered around the shrine entrance, I strained to get a glimpse of the statue of Sundareshwarar, but green cloths draped over the palanquin kept it hidden. Worshipers surged forward in mass delirium, snapping photos with their cellphones, bowing to the palanquin and chanting hymns. They stretched out their hands to touch the carriage. Priests ordered them back.
Then the priests veered into the inner sanctum, carrying the unseen god toward the eager arms of his wife. They too had a night of divine pleasure ahead of them, so we were all ushered out as the guards began locking up.
This union of Meenakshi and Sundareshwarar is a nightly ritual in Madurai, the largest temple city in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, drawing feverish crowds of Hindu devotees. In much of India, the gods are not creatures of distant myth to be worshiped as abstractions. They exist in our world, in our time, and are fully integrated into the daily lives of Hindu believers. They move simultaneously through the world of the divine and the world that we inhabit, and are subject to all the emotions and experiences that we humans are all too familiar with — including carnal desire.
Few things in India express the continuous presence of the gods better than the ancient, massive temple complexes of Tamil Nadu. Walk through any city there and what catches your eye first are the soaring temple entrances known as gopuras, sacred skyscrapers decorated with a phantasmagoria of Hindu statues of multi-armed, bug-eyed gods, mythical beasts and chiseled warriors. Thousands of such statues adorn the largest gopuras, like the ones rising from the Meenakshi-Sundareshwarar temple in Madurai, one of the holiest pilgrimage sites in India.
“Here, we have a proverb: ‘Where there is a temple, people can live,’ ” said Ram Kumar, a guide I had hired in Madurai. “The temple is the center of a person’s living space.”
Though Kerala, the state just to the west, draws larger tourist crowds, Tamil Nadu is an increasingly popular destination. One of India’s most developed states, it also has beaches and lush farmland, and its cuisine is among the most flavorful — and hottest — in India.
But it is the temple circuit that is the main draw, as it has been for centuries. Indeed, many of Tamil Nadu’s residents see the state as a repository of “pure” Hindu culture. In many ways, it is a country within a country, proudly preserving its ancient Dravidian culture, most noticeably in the widespread use of the Tamil language.
I had been to India four times, but never to the south, so I had little idea of what to expect in December, when I flew with my friend Tini into Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. We were met by a driver from a hotel in Mahabalipuram, a beach town 36 miles south. He whisked us into an Ambassador, those grand 1950s-style sedans ubiquitous throughout India, and off we went, veering past cows, motor rickshaws and overcrowded buses.
The chaos of India — sometimes the very quality that draws me there — wasn’t quite what I needed on this vacation. For a moment, as we were flying through the insane traffic, I had second thoughts about the whole trip.
Then we pulled into Mahabalipuram; I could see the ocean as we cruised into town. There was the smell of salt in the air, and we drove through quiet lanes to the seaside hotel. The beach there is not of the golden-sand-and-swaying-palms kind you find in Goa or Kerala, but it is a pretty stretch to walk along and unwind from sightseeing (think fishing skiffs and seafood restaurants).
It is the town’s stone architecture, some of the oldest in India, that makes Mahabalipuram a good first stop on the temple crawl. Biking between temples seemed the most relaxed way of taking in the sights, so off we went to a set of mini-temples on the southern edge of town. The place was already crowded with Indian tourists and juice vendors standing next to carts piled high with green coconuts.
The ancient site was designed to be a big outdoor showroom that exhibited the skills of the town’s architects. Incredibly, the set of temples, the Five Rathas, was carved from a single large slab of granite: models in the Dravida style.
As I pedaled north, I heard the chiseling of stone coming from roadside workshops — a sound I would hear throughout the day — reminding me that Mahabalipuram is still the stone-sculpturing capital of India, just as it was in ancient times. Likenesses of major Hindu gods like Shiva, Vishnu and Ganesh roll out of these workshops and into homes and offices around the country.
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