Over eight days in Tamil Nadu I feel the centuries ripen and coalesce within me, like words finding a tune. Doesn’t the wonder of the present moment—and therefore of travel—sometimes lie precisely in its all-seeing belatedness, the way in which it can gather the entire past into itself? Walking on the flagstones in the vast temple complex dedicated to the fish-eyed goddess Meenakshi in the ancient city of Madurai, home to more than 30,000 statues of celestials; or marvelling at the 80-ton cupola perched atop 11th-century monarch Rajaraja Chola’s magnificent Brihadeeswara Temple in Thanjavur (said to have been hauled to the summit by a retinue of elephants on a ramp more than four miles long); or facing a life-sized elephant on the 43-foot-tall open-air frieze made in about AD 600 at Mahabalipuram, one of the -greatest examples of street art from the ancient world, I feel time differently. It’s a vital, sensual force, as teasing as Vishnu’s enigmatic smile.
“In north India the great monuments of the past are usually royal palaces and forts,” observes my wise guide and companion, N Paneer Selvam, whose two great passions are temples and birds. “But the great dynasties in the south, such as the Pallavas and the Cholas, devoted their energies to building temples. There was a social consciousness among the monarchs: the king’s duty was to build a bridge between divine and human. So the temples were at the heart of the everyday life of old India. They were centres of learning and poetry, schools of music and dance, places of refuge when invaders came raiding.”
.jpg)
He’s right. The old temples of Tamil Nadu are a treasure-trove of forms incised on stone or magicked from brass, and lavished daily with fruit and flowers, incense and sandalwood, music and light. They entangle divine, human, animal, vegetative, historical and fantastical life into one shapeshifting, passionate pictorial script open to endless elaboration. This language can also, suddenly, drop several octaves into minimalism. In the milling crowds I can tell a follower of Siva from the three horizontal white lines on their forehead, and one of Vishnu from two vertical ones, like the finials atop a temple. So simple.
Hinduism is a narrative religion; its mercurial wisdom is lightened and sweetened by stories, softened by ambiguities, sharpened by paradoxes. In the many legends about Siva and Vishnu portrayed in the temples and re-narrated by Selvam, things happen in a dimension distinct from historical time. They take place in an eternal present, as immediate as the hot breath of the cow I feed sheaves of spinach to on a morning walk in Madurai, as around me scores of women stoop over their thresholds making kolams, decorative patterns, with rice flour.
