The Tamil Temple Town Tour

I have been pulled here out of a sense of duty. Duty and the desire to escape a hotel terrace where my immediate neighbors are playing an interminable shuffle of Abba, Aerosmith, James Blunt, and the guttural mellowness of Israeli light rock. I've spent quite a lot of time decrying the sorry state of Indian pop music, but in the grand scheme of things our Judaic friends really take the cake when it comes to assembling offensively bad collections of beach tunes. You know what else Israel and India have in common? Terrorism. Coincidence? Not very likely.

I've just completed my meticulous tour of Tamil Nadu's major temple towns, which was hardly the most invigorating and varied portion of my travels in this country. But hey, money in the bank; money in the bank. It is out of the aforementioned sense of duty that I confer upon my readers this brief guide to The Tamil Temple Tour.

Madurai
In short, awesome. I refer you to this post: Maximum Hindu.

Rameswaram
Also awesome. Island Getaway

Tiruchchirappalli and Srirangam
Not bad but not great. Me Against The World


Thanjavur
Thanjavur is an appealing temple town, in large part because it has things to see that aren't temples. The great temple itself is quite impressive, and mercifully a different shape from the ones in the rest of the state. One can also visit the needlessly complicated and crumbling royal palace complex, where there are several little museums including a brilliant collection of bronze sculptures.

Kumbakonam
Even on the Indian scale, Kumbakonam has wild and chaotic streets. Its roads are currents of pure anarchy of such intensity it can only have resulted from devotees at its numerous Shiva shrines swearing to the Destroyer upon their eternal souls that they will tear the very fabric of the cosmos asunder, drawing and quartering our pitiful, doomed world between a thousand tugging mopeds. There are many Vishnu temples in the city, a Rama temple, and a memorably haunting shrine to Nagaraja, Shiva as the King of Snakes. What there are not many of is eateries that are open between 3:00pm and 6:30pm, a sinister conspiracy amongst its cartel of restauranteurs to daily starve visitors until they are willing to actually pay for the the steaming piles of rice and insipid slop they serve on banana leaves you have to wash yourself.

Darasuram
Darasuram is just down the street from Kumbakonam, and is most remarkable for being just down the street from Kumbakonam.

Gangaikon...I'm not even going to say it
This conspicuously polysyllabic huddle of cottages would merely be notable as a cartographer's headache if it weren't for its very beautiful, impressive, and out of place temple and pleasant adjoining gardens, where the people of nearby villages come to picnic away from the daily humdrum of rice paddies and buffalo shit. (Still not saying it).

Chidambaram
When I got to Chidambaram I checked into a hotel and was told that I was lucky to find a room. Most of the places were full and this joint only had one room left, as there was a dancing festival on and every other room in the hotel was being occupied by a troupe of dancing girls. "Entirely occupied by dancing girls? Do tell..." I thought. The manager wasn't lying. The place was full of dancing girls, between the ages of nine and twelve. Oh, and when you're dealing with five dozen child divas, dressing them up as celestial beings does little to make them more reasonable.

Nevertheless, I was very excited for this one. Chidambaram is the site of the Nataraja temple, and I do mean the Nataraja temple. It is where Shiva, as Nataraja, the Lord of the Cosmic Dance, performed said dance, which is also described as being a full representation of the forces and energies of the universe. He subsequently also defeated the bloodthirsty goddess Kali in what must have been the dance-off of all time. Kali probably was banking on the deities assembled as judges to be scared shitless of her necklace of severed heads and vote in her favor, but when you try to bust a move on Shiva, "You Got...Served!" doesn't even begin to describe the response.

The town, it must be said, is hot and ugly. The temple, while impressive, doesn't stand out as the best in a state full of massive, active temples. The idol of Nataraja itself is one of the most superb I've seen, and if you're into dance, odds are you can arrange to be here for some classical Hindu dance.

No matter when you come, and no matter what your feelings on the matter, you will hear shitloads of bells.

Tiruvannamalai
I wish I could say waking up at 4:30 in the morning to climb halfway up a volcano and sit around blinking while a bunch of dreadlock-beehived saddhus with ash on their faces meditated upon Shiva transforming his cock into an endless pillar of fire and becoming the light of the universe would count among the weirdest of my experiences in India, but I'm afraid I can't say that for certain.

What I can say for certain is that the main temple at the bottom of the volcano is also pretty cool. Pretty cool, but not the best. It has an above-average concentration of religious wackos, but its actual shrines aren't that spectacular, save for the fact that this Temple of the Eternal Dawn is dedicated to aforementioned phallic conflagration and is at the base of a memorably-hued volcano. In the early morning, when the rocky pinnacle is lit almost blood-red and the lower temple resounds with eerie chants to the element of fire, one can hardly resist the urge to start opening boxes in hope of finding the Megaton Hammer and kicking some dragon ass. If you're lucky enough to be here at festival time, the priests provoke their own little pillar of fire by immolating a massive vat of butter on the summit, which reputedly requires a 100-foot wick. My opinion is that if you're the high priest of the Temple of Eternal Dawn performing a ceremony on a volcano, you shouldn't be afraid to get your chest hair a little singed. Though to be fair, the average brahmin seems very fatty and combustible.

Mamallapuram (a.k.a. Mahabalipuram)
This town is by far the most touristed on the temple circuit, and distinguishes itself from other Tamil Temple Towns for two reasons. 1) It's on the beach. 2)All its famous "temples" are fake.

If you don't mind hanging out in the sort of place where a local business has to calls itself the Bob Marley Cafe to stand out from the horde of lesser cafes which stoop to playing the music of other performers (such as Ziggy Marley), you will probably enjoy a few days cruising around pretending to be interested in ancient art and savoring that most rare of Tamil commodities: a decent breeze.

Mamallapuram is to this day the most renowned center of Hindu stone-carving, and everywhere you look people are still carving magnificent statues. The little rocky hill behind the town is essentially a fading gallery of boulders and rockfaces where the local artists spent a good portion of the first millennium A.D carving statues, bas-refiefs, and little fake temples just to show off. As the works were carved of the artists' own volition, there is a charming diversity of subject matter, as if the old masters had muttered "You know what? If I get an order to carve one more fucking Ganesh I'm going to put a chisel through my brain. Well, since I'm not busy today...you see that rock there? I'M CARVING A DUCK. WITH ONE FUCKING HEAD."

It's a nice change of pace.

Kanchipuram
I haven't actually been there yet, and I'm not going to. I've had enough Tamil Temples, and as a writer of increasingly staid travel information I have one formidable weapon in my arsenal: "Knowledge in the public domain." Wooooop wooop.



So now ends my little jaunt through this Tamil state, which I have covered more meticulously than is probably good for my health. And so too draws to a close my exploration of the far south of India. I say "Why linger somewhere where it is brutally hot all the time when you can venture to parts of the country that are even more brutally hot, but only right now?"

I shall sweat until a million cows have drowned in the salty brine. Attention North India, I'm coming baaaaaaaaaaacckkkkkk........



p.s. a note to indian/indophile bloggers and websites: stop stealing my photos if you don't want your cows to faintly smell of human urine in the mornings. You've been warned.