2/14/06: Raja, Raja, Over the Top or Only the Shadows Know!

Happy Birthday, Mom! Happy Valentines Day to my faithful readers☺!

Guess what? That’s right, another pre-dawn wake up call, for a 6:30 am train and our final busy day of temple hopping. Anne and I are beginning to feel like itinerant rabbis. By 9 am, our driver and local guide, Maharaj (by name, not title) met us as we descended the platform at Tiruchirapalli (say that five times fast, and you will have wasted 15 minutes of your precious existence) aka Trichy.
Having exercised a grand total of 30 minutes in three weeks, Anne and Rick were a little apprehensive about ascending the 487 steps of the Rock Fort Temple, perched atop the only cliff in town. Fortunately, Maharaj was very considerate of our aching soles, and not only allowed booties, but also gamed the system to maximize sandal time. Before the climb, we took a detour to visit a nearby cave temple. On the way up, we stopped three times, once to check out the silent repenters at the halfway house, a Ganesh temple, once to capture the beautiful Trichy panorama, and once to gasp for oxygen! The view was spectacular, but the temples were nothing to write home about (paradoxically, that’s precisely what I’m doing). Which leads one to ask, why the hell did they build this thing so high up?

According to Maharaj, master story-teller, eons ago, Lord Shiva was on a journey from North to South, when Vishnu, disguised as an old man, asked him to carry an ancient relic for him, but made him promise never to let it touch the ground. “Piece of gulab jamun” thought the generous God of Destruction. However, nature called, and Shiva asked a young boy to hold the relic while he drained the yellow from his eyeballs (a Lemo phrase). When Old 3-Eye returned, he found the relic resting on the earth, and the boy scurrying away, towards, guess where: the hill. Shiva was unable to unearth the relic, and gave chase after the boy, finally nabbing the little devil at the pinnacle. Well, it turns out that Vishnu was having a little fun with the easily angered Shiva, because the little tike was a manifestation of Ganesh, his playful, elephant-headed son. Ergo, the Rock Fort Temple is dedicated to Ganesh, and our knees are killing us.

At the site where the relic was permanently implanted into Trichy soil, the superb 16th C. Sri Ranganathaswamy temple arose, dedicated to Vishnu, the largest in India, covering 60 hectares, and laid out in seven concentric walled sections. Non-Hindus were not allowed in the two innermost sanctums. Each section contains one or more of the 21 gopurams (entry towers), each spectacularly covered with thousands of colorfully painted (a 20th century upgrade) carvings, from Ganesh to 12-armed demons. Maharaj unlocked a gate leading up to a roof from which we could gaze over the vast complex and view most of the gopurams as well as the golden dome that covers Vishnu’s sacred sanctum. Better yet, we didn’t have to brave three floors of handicrafts on the way down!

Upon descending, we visited another 1000-pillared hall. Then Maharaj entertained us with another tale that sent Shivas up our minds. A series pillars in the temple displayed the 10 incarnations of Vishnu, each with its own legend, about how he saved the world or tricked an unfaithful blowhard. Interestingly, or perhaps coincidentally, the order of the manifestations bears a striking resemblance to the stages of man’s evolution—from fish to amphibian to land mammal to small early man to uncivilized warrior to family man, and, ultimately, in the last manifestation, a horse-like creature right out of Star Wars. And, all this 300 years BD (before Darwin). Perhaps W can learn something about really intelligent design by visiting this complex with our guide during his March trip to India.

Believe it or not, our day was but half completed, as we boarded our Ford chariot for the hour ride to Thanjavur. We paid a brief visit to the Royal Palace and Museum, built in the 16th Century by Raja Serfoji, a rather plump mustached royal, who was educated in the UK, and returned with a vast collection of books, the majority of which were illustrated. Our favorite contained a series of sketches, where common facial features of humans and animals (weasels, hawks, pigs, etc.) were hypothesized to indicate personality traits. Remember, this is hundreds of years before W and the chimps (allegedly, the monkeys are suing for defamation of character). The palace also contained a fine collection of brass figures rescued from excavations around India, many coming with interesting stories. For example, the standing (still, no sitting) Shiva with one foot on the ground and the other at a 180-degree angle alongside his right ear, is from a dance competition between Shiva and an insubordinate but highly athletic Parvathi. As the story goes, she was matching 3rd-Eye move for move, until he dropped his ear ring, picked it up with his toes, and used his toes to replace the ring. Out of modesty, his opponent withdrew! George Hamilton tried the same move on Dancing With the Stars, but broke a rib! Speaking of ladies’ men, another statue of Shiva is accompanied by 8 adoring women, all of whom ran out of their homes to admire the darling of Darjeeling, interrupting whatever they were doing at the time—from cooking to bathing.

We moved on to Brihadishwara “The Big” Temple, a well-deserved World Heritage site, built around the turn of the second millennium by Raja Raja (Zsa Zsa’s first husband?), glowing golden brown in the setting sun. After passing the outer wall, we entered the compound through a sky-scraping gopuram, with enormous stone statues, currently being sandblasted to clean off years of pollution. Otherwise, the gopuram looked awesome for a thousand year-old tower. Within the temple’s walls stood a series of shrines (to Ganesh, his less-famous brother Subrahmanya, Shiva, Vishnu, and Parvathi), with a constant flow of worshipers, offering food and rupees in return for a blessing and some holy ashes on the forehead. Pillared halls containing 250 linga and beautifully painted scenes covered the full inside lengths and widths of the walls.

Smack in the middle of central courtyard sits a 25 ton Nandi (Shiva’s bull), carved from a single stone…and that’s no BS (unlike the streets of Benares, which contains tons of BS). Nandi (anglicized word for a Barry Manilow song) faces the inner sanctum--a marvel of 11th century architecture on many counts. In the center of the inner sanctum is a 12 foot high, 7 ft radius giant black lingum, draped in white cloth. Even more impressive is the 13 story, 66 m high tower (vimanam), each story telling a litany of tales in its well-preserved carvings. But most impressive is the 66 ton dome that tops the vimanam, not necessarily the dome itself, but the Chola ingenuity applied to get it there 900 years before Caterpillar was hatched. Apparently, a small army of elephants was enlisted to haul the dome up a 4 km mud ramp that started in a nearby town.

Even more remarkably, these 11th century I.M. Pei’s, with no CAD-CAM software to work with, were able to position the complex’s towering structures in such a way that the shadows of the gopurams and vimanams (up to 66 m) never leave the temple walls (3 m).

As our temple touring came to an end, we were sad to part with our trusty T&T guide, Maharaj, and reminded of the oft-seen hermaphroditic statue—half-Shiva and half-Parvathi. No, Maharaj is not a cross-dresser. Rather, the statue represents the fact that we are all part man, part woman, and that, as husband and wife, we are one, which will be the theme for the well-earned R&R for A&R on the West Coast. But not before an overnight train ride from Thanjavur to Chennai, and another short and restless night’s sleep. In preparation, we stopped at our first Indian supermarket to load up on snacks for the ride. Needless to say, I don’t think Wal-Mart has to worry about having their industry outsourced to India.