Where are we?: Christmas Day 2011: Mamallapuram, Bay of Bengal, Tamil Nadu

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Christmas Day 2011: Mamallapuram, Bay of Bengal, Tamil Nadu

We begin the day with gifts – the promise of mutual ayurvedic massages, a chocolate bar each, I re-open the dhoti fabric Betty bought me several weeks and one peninsula ago – then a walk out to the shoreline, among fishermen picking the night’s catch from nets, women gathering the specimens they want for market stalls, young waifs in rags selling necklaces, the odd cow dozing between boats.

After breakfast we join the Sunday throngs down from Chennai to visit the nearby temples and beaches. The atmosphere on the beach is festive: carnival games and rides, fresh slices of watermelon and pineapple on offer, whoops and high-pitched screams as children jump into the surf, caution on the faces of adults in full dress, stepping tentatively into the shallows.

It’s the same picture at the remarkably complete stone-cut ruins of what was once the great port city of the 4^th to 9^th century Pallava dynasty. Apparently an 8th century Tamil text describes this place as Kadal Mallai, Sea Mountain “where the ships rode at anchor bent to the point of breaking laden as they were with wealth, big trunked elephants and gems of nine varieties in heaps.” Today, holidaying children and adults clamber over and around splendidly-detailed bas-reliefs, rock-cut temples, chariots, and life-sized free-standing granite lions and elephants, each figure and scene sourced in stories from the Hindu epic The Mahabharata. Is there anywhere on earth where ancient places are such crowded playgrounds, picnic sites and backdrops for countless glamour photos?

Returning to town, we pass the clink-clink-clink hammer blows of stone carvers bringing to life bookshelf and garden size Shivas, Nandis, polished lingas, Durgas, Vishnu, lions, buxom apsaras and Ganeshes, including tiny ones stretched out in front of Apple computers.

Day’s end and a Christmas dinner of prawns, rice, a coconut veggie curry, beer and ice cream sundaes, served under the night sky, sea surf shuffling in the distance, starry yellow lights spiralling up a nearby palm, tuk-tuks putt-putt-puttering along the street below. Merry Christmas Mamallapuram.

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Where is here?

The title banner includes a detail from “Targets” (2000) by the U.S. artist Joyce Kozloff. “Targets” is a walk-in globe within which are painted panels of every country bombed by the U.S. since 1945. One panel on wheels acts as a door to the globe.

In the detail here, the door is ajar and we look out into the dark uncertain. I want maps (and any official representation of place), notorious for concealing their own human making and values, to have something like this doorway into their made life, an entering place where we can stand and ask questions of all those place names, images and other marks made familiar-seeming and coherent by being caught within the administrative-scientific grid-space of straight lines and co-ordinates. I recommend Kazloff’s creative wonderings about maps, places and empire, including her “Imperial Cities,” “Silk Routes” and “Voyages” projects.

Canadian painter Landon Mackenzie combines her expertise in cartography, her interest in neuroscience, and her curiosity about the experiential dimensions of place, its human ‘mapping’, and the contending personal and cultural memories and their stories (“the ghostly bits”) that inhabit places and maps. Mackenzie’s work is discussed widely but most interestingly from the perspective of this blog by Alan Morantz, Where is Here? Canada’s Maps and the Stories They Tell.

The traveller's way

The traveller’s way, as experienced here, offers up blind corners and wonders. It branches and digresses. It leads to places that excavate memories, to others that invite dialogue and questions. The traveller’s way humbles with what is not known or understood. Beyond the coordinates of empire, the traveller’s way invites the toes to stretch and curl down into those singular places where the peculiar energies of the ghosts of others’ creaturely lives seem to whisper words like ‘longing’, ‘delight’, ‘care’. The traveller’s way cheers on a more open life.