Dharasuram – From Pyrenees to Pennines

My diary, revived from my trip to India back in 2007. This second part details my solo travels during the last three weeks or so.

In which Gwen is my Tour Leader for the Day

Sunday 25th November.

Up, and early breakfast, then took the scooter to New Bus Stand to get the bus for Kumbakonam- the 1 ½ hour journey for 2 of us cost Rs. 30.

Kumbakonam, a not exactly enormous town, has 18 – eighteen – temples. We saw 3. The first, Sarangapani is dedicated to Vishnu, and boasts a temple elephant, who for a small sum, blessed us both. We were much bothered by the monks and so on, but the carvings were magnificent and we did a little shopping too. Lots of the statues are painted here, unlike those in Thanjavur.

Kumbeshwara, the Shiva temple, was exquisite, with very fine and detailed carving.

The Nageshwara temple was not unlike the first one.Then we went and watched some bronze casters at work using the lost wax technique, and Gwen nearly bought one.

But lunch called and a hard hunt eventually found us a not bad spit-and sawdust lunch. Then the bus to Dharasuram. Again, the temple here is superb. Wonderful rows of miniature and not-so miniature sculptures, But the pavings were so hot. Really uncomfortable. Because of course, on holy ground, our feet were bare. It was great – we thought – that the sculpture was unpainted. But talk about sculpture to excess! No surface was unadorned.

On the way back to the bus we came across a park: and this friendly bunch, thrilled that Gwen could chat to them in Tamil.

Then we hunted for the loo and caught a bus home. We sat at the front, and Gwen saw someone be sick out of the window. It was that sort of journey.

I’m sorry my entry for this busy day, full of new experiences, was so brief. We went out for the evening (more about that next week) and I must just have been too tired to write more.

And I hope you worked out that my featured photo is today’s offering for #SimplyRed.

After I’d left my new English friends to do solo travelling, my first stop was Thanjavur. I wanted temples in Tamil Nadu, and it seemed to be a toss-up between Thanjavur and Madurai. Thanjavur won, because I suspected it was less on the tourist trail.

Thanjavur and its Chola Temple at sunset.

In case you don’t know, CouchSurfing is an online community in which travellers offer and make use of hospitality offered. It’s based on the premise that this makes travelling more affordable, but more importantly, gives travellers the opportunity to experience the community they’re visiting at first hand, rather than in the somewhat detached way hotels can offer.

So I stayed with Gwen, an American doing post-graduate research at the University there. We’d exchanged emails over a month or two, and she didn’t feel like a stranger when I met her. She gave me a wonderful welcome and few days with her. Gwen had made it her business to be part of the community she lived in. She’d learnt fluent Tamil, so had good relationships with her neighbours. So while there, I had the chance to mooch round and enjoy with her the rangoli decorations and lights put out at night for a Hindu Festival of Light (not Diwali, yet another one).

Rangoli decorations lit up in the street at night.

I met the neighbours and was invited into their homes. I narrowly avoided a big faux pas with one household: a young couple, both teaching at the university. Invited to sit down, I nearly plonked myself in the nearest vacant place on a sofa. I recovered myself in time and did not sit, after all, next to the husband, but squeezed onto the other sofa, with the women. Gwen said it would have seemed very odd to them if I hadn’t remembered in time. We chatted to another neighbour, a Christian, who explained that she liked to keep the Hindu festivals too, and showed us her Hindu decorations taking their place alongside her pictures of the Pope.

I ran errands for Gwen, and in that way had several language-less conversations in the food market, where everyone was keen to shake my hand, because tourists in Thanjavur don’t generally go and buy half a kilo of carrots.

We zipped round on her scooter and bought takeaways. These are known as ‘parcel meals’, and neatly packed up for you in a cotton cloth. We caught local buses together and visited temples. We had meals, served on a square of banana leaf, in local cafés. I wandered round her neighbourhood when she wasn’t there, and saw a small community going about its day-to-day business.

Street scene, Thanjavur

Another street scene, Thanjavur.

Goats eat breakfast in Thanjavur

I was woken in the morning to local sounds: the Muslim Call to Prayer transmitted by loud microphone at, erm, 5.30 a.m. : the church bells ringing a few minutes after that (20 % Muslim and Christian communities here): the street hawkers who kicked in at about 6.45: the day-today noise which seems to begin so early in Indian communities.

View from Gwen’s window. She looks healthy, despite her diet.

And of course it was interesting to talk to Gwen, who knew exactly what I would be finding difficult, and could guess what assumptions I might be making. She gave me the odd Tamil lesson, and more importantly a gesture one (‘Yes’ and ‘No’ are the opposite way round from ours, I learned rather late in the day). She was much the same age as Tom and Ellie, but that didn’t seem to matter – it didn’t to me, anyway.

I’m ashamed not to be giving you an art history lesson involving all those temples. Quite simply, I didn’t label my photos well enough. Instead, I’ll give you a picture-show: From Thanjavur itself; from the small town of Kumbeshwara which has eighteen temples; from the exquisite temple at Kambakonam; and from Dharasuram. Sadly, one of my main memories of Dharasuram was the astonishing pain of trying to walk round the site. One always leaves ones shoes at the entrance to a temple, and the paving stones were fiery hot and burning. As usual, no surface remained unadorned, but studying them in detail proved impossible.

Besides the detail of the sculptures, enjoy the temple elephant giving us a blessing, and the bronze worker busy working at the bazaar within the Nageshwara Shiva temple in Kumbeshwara. Don’t think of these places as simply being lavishly decorated places of worship. They’re living communities, with bazaars, sometimes cattle and elephants. Some, such as the Chola Temple at Thanjavur, have inviting grassy spaces. Bring the family for a picnic!