The Age of Kali: Indian Travels & Encounters by Dalrymple William

Author:Dalrymple, William [Dalrymple, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, History, Religion
ISBN: 9780307948939
Goodreads: 13533402
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1998-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

The next evening at ten o’clock I again made my way along the dusty, pilgrim-clogged streets of Madurai, and through the labyrinth of horn-hooting, rickshaw-squealing lanes leading up to the great sacred tank.

Everything had been transformed since the morning procession. Temple bells rang out over a hot, thick blanket of darkness, lit here and there by the naked electric lights of the tea-stalls and the flickering camphor flames of the pilgrims’ lamps. Around the side of the tank the crowds were massing, all dressed up in their neatly-pressed new lungis and their best silk saris. Some sat up on the parapet, nibbling from cones of chickpeas and roasted dal, while all around them balloon-sellers and ice-cream wallahs, peanut-roasters and sweetmeat vendors sold their wares. Here and there, among the sea of milling pilgrims and townsfolk, stood crowded bullock carts full of families who had driven in from their villages to see the festival: burly, moustachioed farmers and their womenfolk and children. From their eminence they peered eagerly over the heads of the crowd towards the illuminated spire of the island temple rising in to the sky, its image perfectly reflected in the still waters of the tank.

‘We come for every festival,’ said Pandyan, a farmer sitting in the front of one especially-heavily laden cart, bearing no fewer than fifteen women and children from his extended family. ‘Our village is only twenty kilometres away, so if all goes well we can get back home before dawn.’

‘In our village we have a small temple to Meenakshi,’ said Pandyan’s wife, Kasi Ama. ‘But it is better to come and give our offerings to her here.’

‘On a festival day,’ said Pandyan, ‘Ammah cannot refuse anything, if you ask her with a clean mind.’

It was now well after eleven, an hour after the ceremony should have begun, and the Brahmins were still waiting for the exact moment, determined by the astrologers, for Meenakshi and Sundareshvara to begin their journey around the lake. As we spoke, a ripple of expectation passed through the crowd. From the small Maryamman temple by the lakeside the Brahmins were now emerging in a file, their oiled bodies glistening in the light of their flickering camphor torches. As they processed out, the crowd parted before them, and they made their way slowly to the ghat steps leading down to the waters of the tank, where the raft was waiting. In the morning it had looked a rather flimsy and makeshift object, with its crude woodwork and naïvely painted papier mâché; but now, ablaze with lamps in the burnished darkness, it was transformed in to something gilded and magnificent: a huge floating temple, suspended on the dark waters of the tank. In the centre of the raft, reclining in their silken palkis amid their robes and garlands, were the golden images of Meenakshi and Sundareshvara.

With a beating of drums, forty or fifty well-built villagers filed out of the temple and took up their stations along the side of the tank parapet.

‘These are villagers from Antonedi,’ said Mohan Pundit, a temple priest I had met earlier that morning.

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