The Call of the South - Part Two

National Highway 47 and Suchindram

The distance from Trivandrum to the temple town of Suchindram on the promisingly named National Highway 47 is barely 50 miles. This is the deep south of India. The land of gently swaying coconut palms and emerald green paddy fields, red earth and sea-misted air. 

But these days, it is also the land of one crowded little town cheek by jowl with the next one. Neyyantinkara.  Parassala.  Kaliakkavillai. Kuzhittura. Marthandam. Padmanabhapuram. A Christian college of engineering, and a rival Catholic one, eyeing each other across the highway.  Nagercoil, with its jumble of dozens of schools and colleges, hospitals, dispensaries and clinics, shops, temples, churches and mosques. There is traffic of every conceivable variety – human, truck, bus, bicycle, car, bullock cart, rickshaw, handcart. And there is noise, competing for diversity and attention with the traffic, from honking buses, blaring car horns, tinkling bicycle bells, hoarse rickshaw air horns, teashop, temple and mosque music, yelling vendors, barking dogs, mooing oxen and people shouting across the din to hear each other. And potholes, and dust.  There is the merest, barely-there, blink-and you’ll-miss-it tantalizing glimpse of a coconut grove or paddy field before the next town comes up and you are enveloped in the chaos all over again.

This is where we were early this year, my daughter and I, slowly bumping our way down National Highway 47, so named perhaps as an optimistic symbol of the new Shining India, but in reality, in a comforting and reassuring way, very much representative of the India that will always come to mind when I think of India, the India of chaos and confusion and bustle and awful roads.  Utterly unique, and so intensely alive and colorful.

We arrived in Suchindram well over two hours after we set out from Trivandrum. It was late in the afternoon as we navigated our way through its crowded streets. Finally, we came to a stop. And gasped, at what stood before us.

This is the magnificent old temple at Suchindram, variously called the Sthanumalayan Temple, the Suchindram Hanuman Temple, or just the Suchindram Temple . Parts of the temple date from the 9^th century AD, and the breathtakingly lovely gopuram was completed in the 16^th century.  This is a place where Shaivites and Vaishnavites can set aside their differences and pray, as this temple has a lingam that represents the entire supreme trinity of Hinduism - Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva - a feature that is probably unique among the temples of India. It is likely that the temple evolved this way as a result of the joint influences of the Vishnu-worshipping Travancore kings as well as of  the Nanjil Pillais of nearby Nagercoil, who followed the Shaivite inclinations of the Cholas who ruled the area before it became part of the Travancore kingdom.

The name Suchindram means the place where Indra made himself pure (suchi). There is a racy legend behind the name.  Apparently, Indra (a Vedic god of an all-too-human disposition) coveted the beautiful Ahalya, wife of the stern and pious sage Gautama. His desire for her made him throw caution and propriety to the winds. Very early one morning, Indra arrived outside Gautama's hut, and crowed like a rooster. Sage Gautama awoke with a start, and thinking that he had overslept, hurried to the river for his morning ablutions, while Ahalya continued to sleep. Indra, disguising himself as Gautama, entered the sage’s hut, where he fulfilled his desire for the lovely Ahalya. He was caught in the act by Gautama who, realizing that it was yet too early for his bath, returned sooner than anticipated by the amorous Indra. In his fury, Gautama cursed his wife to be turned to stone; Indra was shamed for life by being cursed with having his entire body covered with female genitalia. Naturally, Indra could not go around like this without being mercilessly teased and ridiculed, and so he made his way to where Suchindram is today, to pray and undergo rigorous penances which would purify him and absolve him of his curse. It is believed that Indra continues to worship at this temple every night, and so the priests ready the sanctum for his visit every evening. These priests take a vow of secrecy, to never reveal what they see or experience in the temple at night.

No cameras were allowed inside the temple, so we spent some time taking these photos before entering the temple.

 Right around the corner from the temple were these spice sellers, with a fascinating assortment of spices, jaggery and other mystery items. The jaggery, molded into cones, was covered completely with a crawling mass of bugs, which, the spice seller assured me with a disarming, paan-stained grin, were harmless and very innocent fruit flies. They looked very much like the regular variety to me.

As we wandered around, people yelled out to us in Hindi – oh, the sheer disgrace and effrontery of it, Hindi - has it wormed its way here as well, into the far south of Tamil Nadu? – “aayiye madam, dekhiye” (come along, madam, take a look). I grew up during the anti-Hindi movement in Tamil Nadu and still have strong views about Hindi making its way into places where it has no business being. Irrational, perhaps, but these strong sentiments do not die easily.

At the entrance to the temple we were sucked into the coconut and banana buying routine. A few steps inside, we were buttonholed into buying a very long and very poky thulasi malai (holy basil garland). A man tailed us all the way around the temple, giving us garbled accounts of the various legends and stories that it is known for. We saw a lovely and unique statue of Ganesha with the body of Parvathi, his mother; a majestic dancing Nataraja; halls with intricately carved pillars, each telling a variety of stories; the famous musical pillars; the long, cool corridors and the sanctum sanctorum, aglow with candles. Then we made our way towards the Hanuman, who looked down at us in benign majesty from his height of 18 feet. Yet again, before we quite understood what was happening, we were made to buy a good quantity of freshly-churned butter, which, smeared messily on Hanuman’s head, seemed like a complete waste of it to me.  The tulasi malai and a vadai malai (garland of vadais, dried lentil cakes) were draped around the Hanuman.  At least the vadais did not go to waste.  The man who had been tailing us snapped his fingers, and like magic, dozens of people clustered around us, all beseeching us for a piece of the vadais. We were only too happy to oblige.

We walked out of the temple into the cool evening air. The sun was setting; it would be too late to catch the sunset at Kanyakumari, our next destination. That was okay.  We would enjoy what we could of it from National Highway 47.

To be continued.