CHAPTER XII.

THE SOUTH INDIAN TEMPLES.

Leaving Colombo by steamer one evening in the later part of January, I landed on the sandy flat shores of Tuticorin the next day about noon. The deck was crowded with 250 of the poorest class of Tamils, coolies mostly, with women and children, lying in decent confusion heaped upon one another, passively but sadly enduring the evil motion of the ship and the cold night air. One man, nameless, unknown, and abjectly thin, died in the night and was cast overboard. I was the only Englishman on board beside the captain and officers. Said the second officer, “Well, I would rather have these fellows than a lot of English emigrants. The lowest class of English are the damnedest, dirtiest, etceteraest etceteras in the world.”

Tuticorin is a small place with a large cotton mill, several Roman Catholic churches and chapels, relics of Portuguese times, and a semi-christianised semi-wage-slaving native population. From there to Madras is about two days by rail through the great plains of the Carnatic, which stretch between the sea-shore and the Ghauts--long stretches of sand and scrub, scattered bushes and small trees, and the kittool palm; paddy at intervals where the land is moister, and considerable quantities of cotton on the darker soil near Tuticorin; mud and thatch villages under clumps of coco-palm (not such fine trees as in Ceylon); and places of village worship--a portico or shrine with a great clay elephant or half-circle of rude images of horses facing it; the women working in the fields or stacking the rice-straw in stacks similar to our corn-stacks; the men drawing water from their wells to run along the irrigation channels, or in some cases actually carrying the water in pots to pour over their crops!

These plains, like the plains of the Ganges, have been the scene of an advanced civilization from early times, and have now for two thousand years at any rate been occupied by the Tamil populations. Fergusson in his _History of Architecture_ speaks of _thirty_ great Dravidian temples to be found in this region, “any one of which must have cost as much to build as an English cathedral.” I visited three, those of Mádura, Tanjore, and Chidámbaram; which I will describe, taking that at Tanjore first, as having the most definite form and plan.

I have already (chap. VII.) given some account of a smaller Hindu temple. The temples in this region are on the same general plan. There is no vast interior as in a Western cathedral, but they depend for their effect rather upon the darkness and inaccessibility of the inner shrines and passages, and upon the gorgeous external assemblage of towers and porticos and tanks and arcades brought together within the same enclosure. At Mádura the whole circumference of the temple is over 1,000 yards, and at Sri Rungam each side of the enclosure is as much as half a mile long. In every case there has no doubt been an original shrine of the god, round which buildings have accumulated, the external enclosure being thrown out into a larger and larger circumference as time went on; and in many cases the later buildings, the handsome outlying gateways or _gópuras_ and towers, have by their size completely dwarfed the shrine to which they are supposed to be subsidiary, thus producing a poor artistic effect.

[Illustration: TEMPLE AT TANJORE, GENERAL VIEW.

(_Portico with colossal bull on the right, priests’ quarters among trees on the left._)]

In the temple at Tanjore the great court is 170 yards long by 85 wide. You enter through a gateway forming a pyramidal structure 40 or 50 feet high, ornamented with the usual carved figures of Siva and his demon doorkeepers, and find yourself in a beautiful courtyard, flagged, with an arcade running round three sides, the fourth side being occupied by priests’ quarters; clumps of coco-palms and other trees throw a grateful shade here and there; in front of you rises the great pyramidal tower, or pagoda, 190 feet high, which surmounts the main shrine, and between the shrine and yourself is an open portico on stone pillars, beneath which reposes a huge couchant bull, about six yards long and four yards high, said to be cut from a solid block of syenite brought 400 miles from the quarries. This bull is certainly very primitive work, and is quite brown and saturated with constant libations of oil; but whether it is 2,700 years old, as the people here say, is another question. The difficulty of determining dates in these matters is very great; historical accuracy is unknown in this land; and architectural style gives but an uncertain clue, since it has probably changed but little. Thus we have the absurdity that while natives of education and intelligence are asserting on the one hand that some of these temples are five or even ten thousand years old, the Western architects assert equally strongly that they can find no work in them of earlier date than 1000 A.D., while much of it belongs to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Probably the architects are in the main right. It is quite probable however that the inner shrines in most of these cases _are_ extremely old, much older than 1000 A.D.; but they are so buried beneath later work, and access to them is so difficult, and if access were obtained their more primitive style would so baffle chronology, that the question must yet remain undetermined.

Close to the bull is the _kampam_ or flagstaff, and then, beyond, a flight of steps leading up to the main sanctuary and the tower or pagoda. The sanctuary is all fine and simple work of red sandstone in which horizontal lines predominate. At its far end and under the pagoda would be no doubt the inner shrine or holy of holies--the _vimana_ or womb of the temple, a cubical chamber, in which the _lingam_ would be placed. Into these mysteries we did not penetrate, but contented ourselves with looking at the pagoda from the outside. It is a very dignified and reposeful piece of work, supposed by Fergusson to belong to the early part of the fourteenth century; ninety-six feet square at the base, with vertical sides for about fifty feet, and then gradually drawing in narrower through thirteen stories to the summit (see plate at head of this chapter). The red sandstone walls at the base are finely and quietly paneled, with statues of Siva--not grotesque, but dignified and even graceful--in the niches. Higher up in the pyramidal part the statues are fewer, and are mingled with couchant bulls and flame-like designs composed of multitudinous cobras and conches and discs (symbols of the god--who is lord of Time, the revolving disc, and of Space, represented by the sounding conch) in tiers of continually diminishing size to the summit, where a small dome--said to be also a single massive block of stone--is surmounted by a golden pinnacle. The natural red of the stone which forms the lower walls is artificially deepened in the panels, and the traces of blue and green tints remaining, together with silvery and brown incrustations of lichen in the upper parts, give a wonderful richness to the whole. I am afraid however that the pyramidal structure is not stone, but brick covered with plaster. The frequency of the bull everywhere throughout this and other Saivite temples reminds one of the part played by the same animal in Persian and Egyptian worship, and of the import of the Zodiacal sign Taurus as a root-element of the solar religions. The general structure and disposition of these buildings might I should think also recall the Jewish and Egyptian temples.

All round the base of the great sanctuary and in other parts of the temple at Tanjore are immense inscriptions--in Telugu, says one of the Brahmans, but I cannot tell--some very fresh and apparently modern, others nearly quite obliterated.

The absolute incapacity shown by the Hindus for reasoned observation in religious matters was illustrated by my guide--who did not in other respects appear to be at all a stickler for his religion. When he first called my attention to the pagoda he said, adding to his praise of its beauty, “Yes, and it never casts a shadow, never any shadow.” Of course I did not trouble to argue such a point, and as we were standing at the time on the sunlit side of the building there certainly was no shadow visible _there_. Presently however--after say half an hour--we got round to the other side, and were _actually standing in the shadow_, which was then quite extensive, it being only about 9 a.m., and the sun completely hidden from us by the pagoda; I had forgotten all about the matter; when the guide said again and with enthusiasm, “And it has no shadow.” Then seeing my face (!) he added, “No, this is not the shadow.” “But,” said I, “it _is_.” “No,” he repeated, “this is not the shadow of the _pagoda_, for that never casts any shadow”--and then he turned for corroboration to an old half-naked Brahman standing by, who of course repeated the formula--and with an air of mechanical conviction which made me at once feel that further parley was useless.

It might seem strange to any one not acquainted with the peculiarities of human nature that people should go on perhaps for centuries calmly stating an obvious contradiction in terms like that, without ever so to speak turning a hair! But so it is, and I am afraid even we Westerners can by no means claim to be innocent of the practice. Among the Hindus, however, in connection with religion this feature is really an awkward one. Acute and subtle as they are, yet when religion comes on the field their presence of mind forsakes them, and they make the most wild and unjustifiable statements. I am sorry to say I have never witnessed a real good thungeing miracle myself. We have all heard plenty of stories of such things in India, and I have met various Hindus of ability and culture who evidently quite believed them, but (although quite willing and ready-equipped to believe them myself) I have always felt, since that experience of the shadow, that one “couldn’t be too careful.”

On either side of the great pagoda, and standing separate in the courtyard, are two quite small temples dedicated, one to Ganésa and the other to Soubramániya, very elegant, both of them; and one or two stone _pandals_ or porticos for resting places of the gods in processions. One can imagine what splendid arenas for processions and festivals these courts must afford, in which enormous crowds sometimes assemble to take part in ceremonials similar to that which I have described in