Holy waves, fortune-tellers and winged elephants: in Tamil Nadu

Our first experience of the south India state of Tamil Nadu is the busy town of Kanyakumari, sitting on the farthest southern tip of the Indian peninsula at the confluence of three bodies of water: the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. It is the experience of land’s end that attracts a few curious travelers like ourselves. But the main attraction, drawing hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims, are the three converging seas, highly auspicious and worth at least one bath in a lifetime.

When we arrive the seashore is ringing with the voices of excited bathers. For one this means a first hesitant step into ocean waters; for another, a touch of the sea water to their forehead, then a quick splash forward, arms waving, daring the depths. Men pose for that perfect Kanyakumari shot, then another, and another. Children play in tidal pools, groups of women sit in gentle waves rolling over nearby rocks. Four young men stand waist-deep while others climb their knees then shoulders to form a pyramid, then tumble into the brink, then clamber up again, whooping, laughing.   

Up on the sandy shore, men slip in and out of bathing suits and underwear. Women in soaked layers of fabric lay out their long saris to dry, some red, some ivory, a colourful patchwork.

The pyramid men, like many other young men here, wear black bathing trunks or black sarong-like panchas with narrow bands of gold or orange trim, snug on the hip, handsome on the trim, all stomach on others. We have met these men before – Ayappa pilgrims – moving by the bus full through Kerala and Tamil Nadu, off to their main forest temple in the Western Ghats, but touching down at other auspicious sites across the south, like here at Kanyakumari. (Ayappa is a deity born of Shiva and Vishnu’s beautiful female form, Mohini. I have read that the Ayappa cult is growing rapidly.)

These Ayappans, often celibate before pilgrimages, are a restless, enthusiastic bunch on the road, singing and chanting ebulliently on the fly, eating quickly by their buses. More than one seems ecstatic at the moment of plunging into the ocean, then rising from it. Our guidebook says what we can easily imagine: that “they are known for their lusty calls-and-responses – Swayiyee Sharanam Ayappan, Give us protection, god Ayappa – reminiscent of English football fans.”

At the seashore temple sits the virgin goddess, Devi Kanyakumari. Although non-Hindus are not permitted in the inner sanctum, we understand the Devi wears a diamond nose stud whose brilliance compares well with the best of Newfoundland lighthouses, and is said to have once functioned in a similar manner.

More shrines and memorials sit a ferryboat ride away. These include a 40-metre tall monstrosity dedicated to the Tamil poet-philosopher Thiruvalluvar, a fellow who is said to have lived sometime between the 2^nd century B.C. and the 5^th or 8^th century A.D., or is a “Homer”-like stand-in for many pre-modern Tamil poet-philosophers. Whatever the case, given the nature of the man’s life-work, the Thirukkural, which is said to carry a message of simplicity and truth, I’m certain I saw statue weep.

A few metres inland, marketers have set up shop along the only paths to and from the blessed waves. Pretty well everything in bad taste and practical need is covered, from garishly painted plastic Ganeshes and other icons to plastic palm trees, shells, bead necklaces, blankets and winter shirts, sparkly girls’ dresses, drinks of coconut milk, batteries and plaster-cast Shivas, as well as travel products, including suitcases to replace the ones that fell apart coming here. Clever palm and card readers are parked at temple gates, along with a man with a parakeet that pulls your fortune card and someone drawing lines in the sand. Business is good. 

Among the many oddities of oddities of this land’s end is how the shoreline is lined with an armada of Christian churches, including a very large Catholic edifice, as if there was once a plan to run raids north into idol-worshipping Hindustan – one man’s idol being another man’s god (and vice versa). The night we arrive a pre-Christmas service is underway, which we wouldn’t have known if the whole several hours (liturgies being read, Indian choral voices singing hymns in various keys and meters) hadn’t been broadcast across town through loudspeakers, then launched once more at sunrise just after (other loudspeakers blazing from a minaret) the Muslim call to prayers. Speaking of the sun, apparently on some days of the year in these parts you can see it setting and the moon rising on the same horizon. A strange, Alice and rabbit hole kind of place.

As we move north and east through Tamil Nadu, visiting Dravidian temple towns, we are in yet another India: a Dravidian-rooted peoples with distinct physical features, another language and, so we read, a sense of otherness from, and often defiance of, the north. It was from these eastern coasts that Indian sailors, fishermen, traders, priests and kings, stone carvers and bronze idol-makers (crafts still so alive in the region) ventured across the seas to ports throughout South-east Asia, prompting the beginnings of new combinations of local and Indianized beliefs, rituals, crafts, architecture and social forms. Wander Angkor Wat, Borobudur, Prambanan, the Batu Caves, Champa, Ayutthaya and you are walking through an Indian Hinduism and Buddhism deeply internalized in distant lands. 

Here, today, in the crowded Hindu-Dravidian temples of Tamil Nadu, we watch with little comprehension the personal rituals and collective ceremonies whirling noisily around us.

A god is carried on a palanquin, hurriedly but ceremoniously, to his consort where they are bedded down together each night. The devout fall belly on stone floor in front of garlanded black-bodied images draped in green, gold, red and orange fabrics. We stare wide-eyed at the profusion of sculpted, vividly-painted gods, goddesses, serpents, winged horses (ashvas), eyes bulging, ecstatic or distressed we can’t tell. We get lost in mazes of pillars and walls and sanctums within sanctums, votive candlelight populating the half-light with pilgrims become black apparitions, shadowy ghosts stretching up stone walls, across smoke-stained ceilings. Our bare feet follow the steps of millions over millennia, sometimes slipping along butter-smooth stone, often stepping through votive oils, wax, rice, crumbled sweets, nasturtium petals.

For us, such outsiders, these are both wondrous and punishing places – teeming, frantic. We end each day exhausted.