A South Indian Journey

by Michael Wood

  Rameshwaram is a central place in this famous tale, for here Rama, the beloved incarnation of Vishnu, worshipped Siva after his destruction of the demon Ravana and his winning back of Sita. Here the great strands of Hinduism come together, and so the temple is revered throughout the subcontinent. All Hindus will try to come here once in their lifetime.

  The town bus dropped us at the South Gate towards seven. Near by, Muslim custodians in white skullcaps were unlocking a little shrine – ‘The Tomb of Cain and Abel’, I was surprised to learn. The sun was already hot. ‘First we bathe in the sea,’ said Mala, striding off purposefully to the pilgrim stalls opposite, clutching her tiffin box and spare sari. Before any puja, or act of worship, there are preparations to be done: ‘You never approach God empty-handed.’ After checking the prices, she bought coconut, bananas, camphor, vilva leaves and a little boat of sewn leaves to make a puja lamp. Then everyone raced off to the beach in high spirits. The men stripped to their shorts or underpants to splash into the surf, the women went in full sari. After nine hours jammed in the bus being feasted on by mosquitoes, the swim was sheer bliss.

  While I dried off, Mala plunged in, letting the waves cover her. Then she stood dripping on the beach, struggling to light her camphor as the breeze kept blowing out her matches. Finally she succeeded and said a little prayer as the little lamp boat went bobbing off across the waves towards Sri Lanka. I sat by her belongings while she went to change with the other women. Just around the bay to the right was a big fishing village with hundreds of boats, a jumble of masts and rigging, with heaps of nets and fish debris on the quay; an occasional pungent whiff came on the breeze. Out in the pearly haze we could see the shadow of the island on the horizon. Then it was time to go to the temple for darshan.

  ‘Absolutely not permitted,’ said the man on the gate, gesturing to me and then pointing to a painted placard: ‘Only Hindus allowed beyond this point.’ Mala was exasperated and told him off, but he would not budge. If I wanted to pursue the matter I should take it up with the committee. I was directed to the temple office where I waited like a petitioner. ‘Not possible,’ said a minion, wagging his head. Just then the head of the temple committee arrived in his office in a neatly ironed safari jacket and bearing a stainless-steel lunch-box.

  ‘You are Hindu?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ I explained I was on pilgrimage with Tamil friends.

  ‘But why?’

  I tried the most unlikely explanation: ‘It was my horoscope, you see: I was instructed to come by the astrologer at the Nataraja temple.’

  He scratched his head. This was unusual. ‘Come in, come in. Sit down.’ He asked the boy to bring tea. Did I have reverence for Lord Siva?

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘You see, usually we do not allow non-Hindus in at all. This is not a strict religious requirement in the scriptures. Indeed many Indian Muslims and Christians come here to worship freely. But problem is, we have many foreigners here; bus parties of French people and Italians in Bermuda shorts with cameras round their necks. If we let them all in they would impinge on the atmosphere for the real devotees who have come here from the farthest reaches of India.’

  ‘I fully understand. But I would be most obliged, if you would be so kind…’

  He relented. He launched into a potted version of the story of Rama’s expedition to Sri Lanka. Then came fatherly talk on matters spiritual.

  ‘The essential thing when you go in is to be pure-spirited. This is one of the holiest places in India. Inside is a most intense and emotional experience. Take this advice with you. Find a quiet corner. Get a few minutes to meditate in peace and calm. Then you will see some benefit of coming here.’ He called for a dish of brightest vermilion and with his thumb daubed it emphatically on my forehead.

  ‘There. Now you are pukka. I will write you a note for the people on the gate.’

  Inside was absolute mayhem. Huge loudspeakers relayed religious music at nerve-jangling volume. Crowds surged backwards and forwards to a racket of bells, singing and shouting. Round every corner was a sudden rush and thunder of drums. And there was water everywhere. A constant stream of dripping devotees hastened in straight from the sea, many of them bearing pots of Ganges water, the traditional gift here, to be poured over the linga. Inside the shrine there are twenty-two sacred stations, many of them wells representing the rivers of India, and here the pilgrims, especially the young men, raucously pour buckets of water over each other. Around the main shrine was a rugby scrum. Wet from head to toe I headed for the outer corridors to try to locate the commissioner’s quiet corner.

  The temple forms a huge rectangle; its most famous feature is a double circuit of corridors round the inner shrines, dramatic colonnades more than 4000 feet long of thirty-foot-high monolithic black granite pillars. The oldest parts of the interior now standing are twelfth-century, made of dark, hard limestone cut in Sri Lanka. But the shrine is evidently much older than its surviving structures. It was already famous in the Mahabharata, whose traditions, like those of the Ramayana, go back to the first millennium BC. Ever since then the island has been one of the great pilgrimage sites, and the official guidebook carries pages of visitors’ comments from Valmiki to Mark Twain, and from Marco Polo to Mahatma Gandhi. Encrusted with carvings, inscriptions and statues, the inner halls are a kind of religious memory store for India; their shelves, niches, shrines, alcoves, and wells form a kind of liturgical theme park for all India’s shrines, a repository of pan-Indian traditions. In the treasury, engraved copper plates describe medieval kings weighing themselves in gold here at the ‘beautiful tirtha of Sri Rama, where the monkey tribes built a bridge across the sea’. Among the bronzes is a lively portrayal of the faithful monkey god Hanuman, garlanded with beads around his head, who gingerly carries a large cylindrical linga like a gunner with a six-inch shell. Mr Ramasamy explained: ‘The main idol is supposed to be the linga brought back by Hanuman himself from Mount Kailash more than three thousand years ago. You see, after Rama overcame Ravana he wanted to worship but there was no linga available. So Hanuman went all the way up to the Himalayas to bring one back. But Hanuman was unavoidably delayed, and Rama made another one out of sand. When Hanuman came back, he was greatly upset to find his efforts had been in vain. So Lord Rama installed Hanuman’s linga also and gave it precedence. ‘This is the very linga,’ said Mr R pointing to a tiny black stone set in a round base and embossed with silver Saivite bands; he spoke with absolute conviction of the presence of the numinous. ‘This we always worship first, in memory of Hanuman.’

  Defeated in my attempt to find a quiet corner as the commissioner had recommended, I beat a retreat to a dosa stall for breakfast, shopped for a souvenir (a little framed picture of Rama and Hanuman), and then headed back to the bus for the next leg, the journey to Tiruchendur. Mr Ramasamy clambered over the folding chairs to count us all, and at about ten we pulled out of the coach park, music blaring, damp saris streaming out of the windows. Mala grinned; little Minakshi was wide-eyed with the fun of it all, while her aunt smiled as she combed the wet knots out of her long black hair, looking – to borrow a phrase – the embodiment of healthy and auspicious female power. And indeed we were all starting to let our hair down.

  Pilgrimage has always been a vital part of Indian culture. In the Mahabharata there is a list of nearly three hundred holy places which forms a clockwise pilgrimage round India from the Himalayas to Comorin. Some of the key sites, like Lake Pushkar, go back to the Stone Age. Indian people have been travelling to worship at sacred places on rivers, mountains and seashores since before history. Very likely, the wanderings of holy men and women contributed as much as anything to the sense of the cultural oneness of India, which long preceded her political unity. Today pilgrimage is a massive industry, which has been totally transformed by cheap transport and mass communications. At the last Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, fifteen million people were present on the main night of a month-long festival. I can remember being at the home of a Tam
il-speaking guide there when poor pilgrims from the deep south arrived from the station; without a word of Hindi, shivering in thin tropical clothes, they had had no idea India was so big, or the north so cold, but they had been drawn there to join in the greatest of all Indian pilgrimages.

  The transformation has happened in little more than a century. When investment in railways was first mooted by the board of the East India Company in the late 1840s, there were those who doubted the viability of railways in India, because it was felt that the rules of caste purity and pollution would deter most people from using trains for fear of rubbing shoulders with the wrong caste. In fact, of course, those rules are infinitely changeable and adaptable (the system would hardly have lasted 3000 years if they were not). Knowing which side their bread was buttered on, Brahmin priests everywhere quickly agreed that travel by train did not mean losing the merits of pilgrimage. (No doubt in time they will also agree, if they have not already, to interactive puja disks and conference-call darshans!)

  By the early 1900s, thousands flocked to places previously visited by hundreds in the days before railways. Now, in its turn, the bus has taken over, and with the increased popularity of gods like Murugan there has been a tenfold growth in pilgrimage in the south since Independence; indeed bus travel has turned a once obscure and inaccessible place, Subarimalai, into the biggest annual pilgrimage in the world, outstripping even Mecca.

  ‘Of course times have changed,’ said Mr Subrahmaniam, reflecting on this as we headed away from Rameshwaram: ‘We do the darshan bus tour for speed and convenience. It is not arduous. Only we are fasting for the duration. This is all. In the old days these journeys were made on foot with only the barest necessities. This procured more merit than taking vehicular transport. But for us, time is not as before. Our fathers had more time. We have to be back to work Tuesday morning punctual.’

  TIRUCHENDUR

  The journey to Tiruchendur took us another eight hours in fierce heat along rough country roads through a baking wilderness of scrub jungle, crumbling red soil and thirsty palms. By noon the bottled water tasted as if it had just been boiled. In the afternoon the bus broke down in the middle of nowhere and the driver had to take the engine to bits while the women trooped off to do their toilet in the bush. Mala nervously paced up and down on the road as time ticked away: though she does not possess a watch she always knows what time it is, and she knew we were now likely to miss the key puja, the one Sivakami had told her to go to in her dream. Eventually we got going once more, and at last, towards five, we saw the gopura of the temple towering above the seashore.

  Tiruchendur means ‘beautiful holy town’ in Tamil, and it is; a seaside town in a very picturesque position, cooled by the sea breezes from Ceylon, a holiday place for fresh air and fun. That Saturday it was bursting at the seams. In the sandy main street of the town we ran into a tide of people like a crowd emptying from a football stadium. To get to the temple from the town you have to walk up a long covered colonnade which stretches for nearly half a mile through the houses and up to the sacred precinct on the seashore: a processional way lined with stalls selling food, tea, flowers, incense, kun kum, astrological readings, children’s toys, cheap clothes and pilgrims’ souvenirs. We struggled up this walkway pushing against the flow of the thousands who were already leaving, and it was past six before we reached our goal. We had just missed the climactic puja of the festival. We pressed on, and suddenly the walkway opened out to reveal vast halls and thousands of people. To a thunderous crescendo of drums and trumpets a troop of elephants caparisoned in gold came sweeping past, followed by glittering palanquins festooned with bunting. We crested. the last rise to the seashore and, choosing our moment, ran across the procession, ducking under the crash barriers and through the police lines. Ahead was the sea; as the light faded a truly fantastic scene was unfolding.

  Stretching away to the southern horizon there were thousands camped on the beach, many taking a dip in the sea as the sun set – a million and a half people according to the police inspector standing by the Lost Persons’ Tent. Beyond them was the deep blue sea, fringed by a line of crashing breakers. On the sand, the pilgrims had lit fires, whose smoke eddied round the beach and swirled up into the sky; the wind was now whipping up long streamers of sari cloths hung out to dry: gold, purple, emerald green, marigold, blood red, snapping in the breeze like the flags of some vast medieval encampment. To the east the sky was already darkened, with colossal thunderclouds piled on top of each other over the Palk Strait and the Arabian Sea. Along the horizon was a strip of pale golden light where the sun had gone. In front of us, the main gate of the temple reared up a hundred and fifty feet above our heads, covered in sculpture from top to bottom. Unlike most temples in the south, Tiruchendur’s stonework is unpainted; scoured and bleached by wind and sun, it glowed an unearthly white against the ink-blue sky. On top, in neon lights, was the leaf-shaped lance of Murugan and the sacred syllable OM. (‘It is visible from my bungalow in Tuticorin – seventeen miles away,’ said a pilgrim who suddenly appeared at my elbow as if to read my thoughts.)

  Below the tower the columned halls of the temple were hung with coloured electric light-bulbs. We went in, to be enveloped by the roar of the crowds. In the front hall on a raised platform a trio of plump Brahmin priests were doling out holy ash to crowds of worshippers and collecting their rupees as fast as they could, sweating profusely. Beyond them we could see deep into the temple where huge queues pressed behind metal barriers snaked off into the darkness, waiting for their brief audience with the god. Because of our bus breaking down we had missed the last puja, and the queues were so great that there hardly seemed time now to wait in line for darshan, that is, just to see Murugan for a few seconds. We had to be back on the bus down in the town at eight for the five-hour journey to our overnight stop at Cape Comorin. I was turning out to be not quite so committed a pilgrim as I had hoped. I was all for calling it a day. Tea and tiffin on the beach suddenly seemed greatly preferable to plunging into the barely suppressed riot which seemed to be going on inside. There might even be time for a swim. Lord Murugan forgive me, I thought; there’ll be another time. Mala paced to and fro, disappointed at my lack of resolution though too polite to say so. Then I heard another voice at my shoulder: ‘Kind sir, what is your native land?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘In all this great congregation of people, I have observed that you are the only foreigner here. Kindly tell me why you have come.’

  He was a sweet-faced older man with grey hair, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, a white dhoti and barefoot. Next to him was a young priest wearing a white loincloth, grey ash daubed on his forehead and his upper arms! The old man ran a packaging company in Tuticorin. In the present difficult economic climate the company had fallen on hard times. He had come today to ask the Lord for help. We talked for a while. I explained that we were late and had missed the puja. We said our goodbyes. Ten minutes later he returned with a second priest.

  ‘You would like to have darshan of the Lord?’

  Mala’s face lit up. ‘We would.’

  ‘Kindly come with me, but first sir I must ask you to take off your shirt. Male worshippers must go before the Lord uncovered.’

  A magic wand had been waved. It turned out the priest worked with the old man in Tuticorin. They had spoken to someone on the temple committee. We were taken to the back of the columned entrance hall to a side door through a high granite wall. The door was besieged by crowds, which were kept at bay by the police with an intimidating display of lathi waving. But after an anxious moment’s push and shove, we were pulled through. We found ourselves in a cavernous corridor with immense carved pillars towering in the gloom, pillars capped by monstrous heads – griffins and basilisks glaring, snarling and biting their own tails. They led us down the hall, under more metal barriers, and through another door to join the pilgrims at the head of the queue outside the holy of holies. At the entrance the Chief of Police waved us on with a wag
of his head, a friendly beam and a wiggle of his luxuriant handlebar moustache. ‘Welcome!’ he said. ‘Come and see the Lord.’

  We stepped on to a raised walkway of wooden duckboards and joined the crowd. First we came to the bronze processional image of Murugan, almost buried in flowers. Then the main stone image of the temple – god as ascetic, renouncer of the transitory and illusory. In his six abodes he has different aspects – Perennial Child, Eternal Youth, Warrior, Husband, Renouncer, Lord of the Tamil Hills – but in all he is benign and life-giving, Apollonian, ‘grace-breathing’, as Robert Browning puts it so memorably in his version of Aeschylus. His wars represent the triumph of good over evil; he destroys wickedness, decay and death. And his smile – the smile of Murugan – is the light of life and eternal youth. For two thousand years that smile has been a theme of Tamil poetry: ‘radiating light, removing darkness from the world’. Finally we were right in front of him. They never fail, do they, these archetypal images? In the modern West we pay analysts to help us tease out some fragmented meaning from such dreams and urges, fulfilled and unfulfilled. Here it is all still out-in the open. Child, goddess, androgyne, killer of the unborn child, whatever you fear or desire you can access directly in cult. The Greeks intuited their imaginal universe in the same way, in their gory myths of father castration and child cannibalism as much as in their mystic tales of renewal in the legends of Demeter and Aphrodite. Here in the presence of an equally rich and ancient body of myth, you can still understand what such stories mean.