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South India 2015

As we began to plan our fourth trip to the subcontinent, we decided it was time to explore South India…

From Mumbai to Chennai via the southern tip of India: we visited Goa, some sites of Karnataka we had not seen before, toured the Western Ghats, got bored in Kerala before getting our fill of temples in Tamil Nadu.

Read on to learn how we fared along the road, what we saw, liked (and did not like).

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Temples Inside Out

 

(vero;2015-May-17)

Azhagar Kovil Temple in Madurai: surprisingly pleasant and welcoming compared to the Meenakshi experience Azhagar Kovil Temple in Madurai: surprisingly pleasant and welcoming compared to the Meenakshi experience

Tamil Nadu is the place of choice to explore southern Indian temple culture and architecture.

The temples there teem with devotees and pilgrims, and are ideal to witness Hindu rituals at their best, from the daily puja to weddings, not to mention the many festivals and processions you are bound to come across. Tamil Nadu temples are also rightly famous for their size and their impressive architecture: soaring bright coloured gopurams, finely carved interiors, pools, yards dotted with shrines, statues of deities brightly decorated, it is a feast for the eyes.

In fact, there are so many temples around that it is difficult to chose which one to visit. At the beginning, we trusted our guidebooks and tended to stick to the BIG ones: Sri Meenakshi in Madurai, Arunachaleswar in Tiruvannamalai, Sri Ranganathaswamy in Trichy, Nataraja in Chidambaram.

However, we soon found out that although being of truly magnificent architecture, those temples were enormously frustrating to visit (with the exception of the Arunachaleswar temple in Tiruvannamalai).

Sri Jambukeshwara Temple in Trichy: not so famous, but very rewarding Sri Jambukeshwara Temple in Trichy: not so famous, but very rewardingThis was particularly true for all active temples: as non-Hindu, one is generally not allowed into the inner sanctum, and some of them have come to forbid access even to secondary shrines, making large areas out of bound and a joke of any visit. In others, the Brahmin priests in charge of the temple management are so unfriendly and aggressive (to us foreigners, but also to Indian devotees) that the whole experience can get quite unpleasant and unnerving.

So we learnt to be more discerning and started giving more attention to ancient (less active) temples (like Gangaikondacholapuram or Thanjavur) or smaller temples where the overall atmosphere is much more relaxed and welcoming (we could even access the inner sanctum in some of them). We also found out that the architecture of many smaller temples, not even mentioned in the guidebooks and discovered while ambling through a neighbourhood, was as impressive as in the big temples. We had a great time in exploring those: our personal highlight in this respect was the town of Kumbakonam.

A nice thing in Tamil Nadu temples is that nearly all of them have a resident elephant on their premises: among other things like parading, his job is to give blessings to pilgrims and visitors. Vero could not resist and had to take the chance: after you have deposited a rupee on his trunk, the elephant then touches softly your head to bless you. He will do so for several pilgrims, collecting all coins in his trunk, and at some point will give them to his mahout sitting behind him on the floor.

You can find descriptions of some of the temples we visited as well as our (very suggestive of course) experience on the ground in the emails we sent while on the road:

We also have a page with photos from street processions, a recurring cheerful and colourful feature of southern Indian cities.

Want to read more? Go back to Kerala or God's Own Country or go on to A Visit to Chennai's High Court or go up to Blog


$updated from: Blog.htxt Mon 04 Mar 2024 16:04:41 trvl2 (By Vero and Thomas Lauer)$