chapter VII. Owing however to former desecrations by the French (who in
1777 fortified the temple itself), and present treatment by the British Government, this Tanjore temple is not so much frequented as it used to be. The late Rajah of Tanjore, prior to 1857, supported the place of course with handsome funds; but the British Government only undertakes _necessary_ repairs and allows a pension of four rupees a month to the existing temple servants. They are therefore in a poor way.
The arcade at the far end and down one side of the court is frescoed with the usual grotesque subjects--flying elephants trampling on unbelievers, rajahs worshiping the god, women bathing, etc., and is furnished the whole way with erect stone _lingams_--there must be at least a hundred of them. These lingams are cylindrical stones a foot and a half high or so, and eight or nine inches thick, some bigger, some smaller, standing in sort of oval troughs, which catch the oil which is constantly poured over the lingams. Women desiring children pay their offerings here, of flowers and oil, and at certain festivals these shrines are, notwithstanding their number, greatly in request.
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The palace at Tanjore is a very commonplace round-arched whitewashed building with several courts--in part of which the women-folk of the late rajah are still living behind their bars and shutters; the whole place a funny medley of Oriental and Western influences; a court of justice opening right on to one of the quadrangles, with great oil paintings of former rajahs; a library; a harness and dress room, with elephants’ saddles, horses’ head-gear, rajah’s headgear, etc.; a reception room also quite open to a court, with sofas, armchairs, absurd prints, a bust of Nelson, and a clockwork ship on a troubled sea; elephants wandering about in the big court; painted figures of English officers on the sideposts of one of the gates, and so forth.
Round the palace, and at some little distance from the temple, clusters the town itself with its narrow alleys and mostly one-storied cottages and cabins, in which the goldsmiths and workers in copper and silver repoussé ware carry on their elegant trades.
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The ancient city of Mádura, though with a population of 60,000, is even more humble in appearance than Tanjore. At first sight it looks like a mere collection of mud cabins--though of course there are English bungalows on the outskirts, and a court-house and a church and an American mission-room and school, and the rest. The weavers are a strong caste here; they weave silk (and cotton) _saris_, though with failing trade as against the incoming machine-products of capitalism--and you see their crimson-dyed pieces stretched on frames in the streets.
The _choultrie_ leading up to one of the temple gates is a colonnade 110 yards long, a central walk and two aisles, with carven monolithic columns--a warrior sitting on a rearing horse trampling shields of soldiers and slaying men or tigers, or a huge seated king or god, in daring crudeness--and great capitals supporting a stone roof. Choultries were used as public feeding-halls and resting-places for Brahmans, as well as for various ceremonies, and in old days when the Brahmans were all-powerful such places were everywhere at their service, and they had a high old time. This choultrie has however been turned into a silk and cotton market, and was gay, when I saw it, with crowds of people, and goods pinned up to the columns. Emerging from it, the eastern gate of the temple stands on the opposite side of the road--a huge _gópura_, pagoda form, fifteen stories or so high, each tier crowded with figures--Siva hideous with six arms and protruding eyes and teeth, Siva dancing, Siva contemplative, Siva and Sakti on the bull, demon doorkeepers, etc.--the whole picked out in the usual crude reds, yellows, greens, blues, and branching out at top into grotesque dragon-forms--a strange piece of work, yet having an impressive total effect, as it rises 200 feet into the resplendent sky over the little mud and thatch cottages--its crude details harmonised in the intense blaze, and its myriad nooks of shadow haunted by swallows, doves and other birds.
There are nine such gópuras or gate-towers in all in this temple, all on much the same plan, ranging from 40 to 200 feet in height, and apparently used to some extent as dwelling-places by priests, yogis, and others. These, together with the various halls, shrines, tanks, arcades, etc., form a huge enclosure 280 yards long by nearly 250 wide.
On entering the huge doorway of the eastern gópura one finds oneself immediately in a wilderness of columns--the hall of a thousand columns--besides arcades, courts, and open and covered spaces,--a labyrinth full of people (for this temple is much frequented)--many of whom are selling wares, but here more for temple use, flowers for offerings, cakes of cowdung ashes for rubbing on the forehead, embroidered bags to put these in, money-changers, elephants here and there, with bundles of green stuff among the columns, elephant-keepers, the populace arriving with offerings, and plentiful Brahmans going to and fro. The effect of the numerous columns--and there are fully a thousand of them, fifteen feet high or so--is very fine--the light and shade, glimpses of sky or trees through avenues of carved monsters, or cavernous labyrinths of the same ending in entire darkness: grotesque work and in detail often repulsive, but lending itself in the mass to the general effect--Siva dancing again, or Ganésa with huge belly and elephant head, or Parvati with monstrous breasts--“all out of one stone, all out of one stone,” the guide keeps repeating: feats of marvelous patience (_e.g._ a chain of separate links all cut from the same block), though ugly enough very often in themselves.
And now skirting round the inner sanctuary to the left, we come into a sort of cloister opening on a tank some fifty yards square, from whence we get a more general view of the place, and realise its expanse. The five or six gópuras visible from our standpoint serve to indicate this--all painted in strong color but subdued by distance, roofs of various portions of the temple, clumps of palm and other trees, two gold-plated turrets shining brilliantly in the sun, the tank itself with handsome stone tiers and greenish waters where the worshipers wash their feet, the cloisters frescoed with elaborate legendary designs, and over all in the blue sky flocks of birds--swallows, doves, and bright green parrots chattering. Once more we plunge into dark galleries full of hungry-eyed Brahmans, and passing the shrine of Minakshi, into which we cannot gain admittance, come into the very sombre and striking corridor which runs round the entire inner shrine. The huge monoliths here are carven with more soberness and grace, and the great capitals bear cross-beams which in their turn support projecting architraves. Hardly a soul do we meet as we make the circuit of the three sides. The last turn brings us to the entrance of the inner sanctuary itself; and here is the gold-plated _kambam_ which I have already described (chap. VII.), and close behind it the bull Nandi and the gloom of the interior lit only by a distant lamp or two. To these inner parts come only those who wish to meditate in quiet; and in some secluded corner may one occasionally be seen, seated on the floor with closed eyes and crossed legs, losing or endeavoring to lose himself in _samádhi_.
Outside the temple in the streets of Mádura we saw three separate Juggernath cars, used on occasions in processions. These cars are common enough even in small Hindu towns. They are unwieldy massive things, often built in several tiers, and with solid wooden wheels on lumbering wooden axles, which look as if they were put on (and probably are) in such a way as to cause the maximum of resistance to motion. At Streevelliputhur there is a car thirty feet high, with wheels eight feet in diameter. The people harness themselves to these things literally in thousands; the harder the car is to move, the greater naturally is the dignity of the god who rides upon it, and the excitement becomes intense when he is at last fairly got under weigh. But I have not witnessed one of these processions.
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The temple of Chidámbaram is in some respects more interesting than those of Tanjore and Mádura. It is in fact more highly thought of as a goal of pilgrimage and a place of festival than any other South Indian temple, and may be said to be the Benares of South India. The word Chidámbaram means _region of pure consciousness_, and Siva is worshiped here under his most excellent name of Nátarája, _lord of the dance_. “O thou who dancest thy illimitable dance in the heaven of pure consciousness.”
There is a little railway station of Chidámbaram, but it is two or three miles from the temple and the town; and though the town itself numbers some 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, there is not a single Englishman resident in the place or within some miles of it, the only white-faced inhabitant being a Eurasian druggist who keeps a shop there. When I was there the whole temple was in course of repair, and the Brahmans were such a nuisance that I really did not get so good an idea of the place as I could have wished. These gentry swarm here, and descend upon one like birds of prey, in quest of tips; indeed the physiognomy of a great many of them suggests the kite family--sharp eyes, rather close together, and a thin aquiline nose; this with their large foreheads looking all the larger on account of the shaven head does not give a very favorable impression.
The ascendancy of the Brahman caste is certainly a very remarkable historical fact. It is possible that at one time they really resembled the guardians of Plato’s ideal republic--teachers and rulers who themselves possessed nothing and were supported by the contributions of the people; but before so many centuries had gone by they must have made the first part of their functions subsidiary to the second, and now--though a good many of them ply trades and avocations of one kind or another--the majority are mere onhangers of the temples, where they become sharers of the funds devoted to the temple services, and bleed the pockets of pious devotees. When a Hindu of any worldly substance approaches one of these places, he is immediately set upon by five or six loafers of this kind--each of whom claims that his is the Brahman family which has always done the priestly services for the visitor’s family (and indeed they do keep careful note of these matters), and that _he_ therefore should conduct the visitor to the proper quarter of the temple, take his offerings to the god, and receive his reward accordingly.
This temple is I should think about the same size as that at Mádura, but more open like the Tanjore temple. There are four gópuras of about equal size--120 feet high or so--at the four points of the compass. On entering by the eastern one the hall of a thousand columns stands away in the court to the right, and gives the idea of a complete temple in itself. The sides and back end are closed in, but the front forms a sort of portico, and columns similar to those of the portico--every one a monolith--extend through the entire interior. There is a lane or aisle down the middle, and then on each side they stand thick, in rows perhaps ten feet apart. As you go in the gloom gets deeper and deeper. Only here and there a gap in the external wall throws a weird light. The whole suggests a rock cave cut in multitudinous pillars to support the overlying weight, or a gloomy forest of tree-trunks. But the columns are commonplace in themselves, and their number and closeness together under a flat roof of no great weight is not architecturally admirable. When you reach the interior sanctum, where you might expect to find the god at home, you discover a mere bare cavity, so dark that you cannot see the roof, and occupied by innumerable bats who resent your intrusion with squeaks and shrieks. But my guide explained to me that twice a year the god _does_ come to dwell there, and then they clean the place up and decorate it with lamps for a season.
A large tank stands just west of this hall--a tank 200 feet long I should think--in which men (and women) were washing their feet and clothes. These tanks are attached to every temple. At Mádura there is a very beautiful one, “the golden lotus tank,” two miles away from the temple, with a pagoda on an island in the midst of it--to which they resort at the Taypúsam festival. Also at Mylapore, Madras, there is a handsome tank with pagoda just outside the temple; but mostly they are within the precincts.
[Illustration: TEMPLE AND TANK AT MYLAPORE, MADRAS.]
Entering the inner inclosure at Chidámbaram you come to various arcades and shrines, where Brahmans and chetties raged. The chetties have great influence at Chidámbaram; their caste supplies I believe the main funds of the temple--which is practically therefore in their hands. I was presented with flower garlands and a lime, and expected to make my money-offering in front of a little temple, of Vishnu I think, which they seasonably explained to me was to be roofed with gold! On the other hand--to the left--was a temple to Siva--both these forms being worshiped here. Into the shrine of Parvati I did not penetrate, but it looked ancient and curious. Fergusson says that this shrine belongs to the 14th or 15th centuries, and the inner sanctuaries to somewhere about 1000 A.D., while the hall of the thousand columns--which shows Mahomedan influence--is as late as the 17th century.
An elderly stoutish man, half naked, but with some authority evidently--who proved afterwards to be the head of the chetties--announced in a loud voice that I was to be treated with respect and shown as much as possible--which only meant that I was to give as large an offering as possible. Then an excited-looking fellow came up, a medium-sized man of about forty, and began talking cockney English as fluently and idiomatically as if he had been born by the Thames, rattling off verses and nursery rhymes with absurd familiarity. The rest said he was a cranky Brahman with an insane gift for language--knew Sanskrit and ever so many tongues.
Escaping from these I left the temple and went into the village to see the goldsmiths who are employed (by the chetties) on work connected with its restoration. Found a large workshop where they were making brass roof-pinnacles, salvers, pedestals for images, etc., and plating the same with gold leaf or plates--also store of solid gold things--armlets and breastplates for the gods, etc.--another touch remindful of Greek life. The gold leaf was being beaten out between thin membranes--many leaves at once--with a hammer. All handwork, of course.
My guide--who is the station clerk and a Brahman, while his station-master is a Sudra (O this steam-engine!)--told me on the way back that the others at the station often advised him to give up his caste practices; but he had plenty of time in the middle of the day, between the trains, to go through his ablutions and other ceremonies, and he did not see why he should not do so.
As we walked along the road we met two pilgrims--with orange-colored cloths--coming along. One of them, a hairy, wild, and obstinate-looking old man, evidently spotted the hated Englishman from afar, and as he passed put his tongue gently but firmly out at me!