p.r.bullen - travelogue

Part 2: Mahabalipuram

We got in to Madras fairly late in the day (it was a long train ride). First, we checked on our reservations for the next leg of the journey, then hired a car to take us to Mahabalipuram (AKA Mamalapuram; most places down south seem to have two or more names, the Raj-era name, and the old & new name, or even the old name, the Raj name and the new name. Whew.) Got in, had a quick walk on the beach, dinner and made an early night of it. The next day, we walked down the beach into town, about 40 minutes, and started off with the best known sight, the Shore Temple. There had been 7 or 8 of them, but the others all fell into the sea due to erosion. The last is protected by a large breakwater. The temples & carvings in Mahabalipuram, like the ones we saw earlier, are hundreds of years old (1000+ some of them). The Shore temple was badly corroded by wind sand sun and surf, but was pretty and picturesque in a unique way, sitting out right next to the beach in the middle of a tidy well cropped green lawn with a fringe of pine trees.

It was hot, so we stopped for a cold fresh-lime soda. Went and looked at some of the rock carvings. They are really unique -- very realistic, scenes of cows being milked, women carrying water, children playing, etc. as Rama holds up a mountain that Ravana has tried to drop on them all (I may be mixing up my stories there, but that's the basic plot even if the characters are all wrong). The next one was enormous, a huge panorama of the Ganges River, represented by a snake going from its tail at the bottom (the source, up in the Himalayas) to it many heads at the top, where it flows into the sea, with god & goddesses festooned about. One carving was of an emaciated ascetic, standing on one leg with his arms over his head. In another spot was a cat in the same position, surrounded by mice & rats -- sort of a self-spoof said our guide.

Actually we did the tour of the complex after a nice lunch, prawns for A. and a lovely fresh tuna steak grilled with onions peppers and a tasty brown sauce for me, with "finger chips" for A. and rice pulao for me. Fresh-lime-sodas and cold beers. Ahhhh. Anyway, you did need a guide. There are about 9 or 10 little sites there, some monolithic temples carved out of the living rock, some shrines carved into an outcropping, some bas-relief (like the two mentioned just above), but without a guide you'd never find them (to say anything about understand what they are) even though they're all in the space of a standard "city block" or two. They were interesting, and there was a great view of the town and the surrounding countryside, but the only two that really stand out are the first two -- Rama holding up the mountain and "Ma Ganga".

We browsed through the innumerable shops on the road from the carvings to the beach (& Beach Temple), all selling statues. Mahabalipuram is a hotbed of stone carving and has the government school of carving. If you buy a stone sculpture anywhere in India, it stands good odds of having been made there. By this time, I was pretty much done-in by the sun and the oppressive heat, so we caught an auto-rickshaw back to the hotel (the Tamil Nadu Beach Resort. Nice place, though the service wasn't very good.)

A nap, a dip in the ocean, a bit of relax, and we headed back into town for dinner. Good meal, more fresh fish. The shtick there is to bring the fish to your table and price it for you. You pick what you want. Nice and fresh, still cold from the ocean, the eyes still nice and black with none of that fishy odor that makes you worry... A delightful meal, preceded and followed by more serious browsing the sculpture emporiums. It was just before the full moon, so we walked back down the beach, which was completely deserted, with the moon coming up over the Bay of Bengal. Small fishing boats (more like three logs tied together) lay pulled up on shore near town, then nothing till our hotel. Delightful and very romantic, like something from a holiday brochure magically (and for once) made real.

Next day, back into town, to the Five Rathas (there are eight in all, but 5 are all together). They are little rock outcroppings on the south side of town that have been carved into little monolithic temples, an elephant (big, but not life-size) and a cow (lying down). They are very much in the Dravidian (south-Indian) style, which is quite different from the north-Indian style.

In the north, the temple roofs are like a series of progressively smaller lotus leaves going up (or, if you look at it another way, like a series of ever larger water falls coming down), and look as much grown as carved/built. The Dravidian temples roofs are basically columns and blocks with many sculptures of gods, goddesses, etc. stuck on, each level smaller right up to the top. These temples were clearly Dravidian, but looked like prototypes -- not so high, not so many levels of columns, not so many statues, probably for a combination of age (i.e., being prototypes) and logistics (the rock outcroppings were only so big, eh?).

There were a lot of Indian tourists there, including number of pilgrims with shaved heads. We walked back into town past still more stone carving places. One had a clay sculpture of two English schoolboys, one on the others shoulders, about 2 feet high, which they were copying to be about 5 feet high in all. Looked like something out of a P.G.Wodehouse story (some early ones are set in boys 'public' schools). Another had done a life-size statue of (?a politician?). I told A. that we should get photos of her dad (full face, profile and 3/4 face) and have them carve a likeness. Bet they would, and do a fair job of it too.

Anyhow, we got back to the main drag and went back into a shop we'd examined the day before, run by a teacher from the gov't sculpture school. Nice guy running it. We had a long running chat/bargain and ended up buying 3 statues: a small Falstaff-like Ganesh, a larger (9") Laxshmi (Rama's wife), and a larger (12" high) masterpiece (round, hollow, with Rama, Laxshmi, Shiva and Parvati [Shiva's wife] each about 9" high, all facing out. The guy said they tried making these as an experiment but that it was just not worth the effort so they stopped. Except for Ganesh, the others are all in traditional poses.

Ganesh in particular, he told us, is carved into lots of different poses, partly because tourists like it and partly because, it seems, the other Gods get irritated at being displayed in non-traditional poses but ol' Ganesh doesn't mind being a fun-loving kind of God. The Reading Ganesh. The Dancing Ganesh. The lolling about Ganesh. The Falstaff Ganesh. You name it, practically.

Back to the guy running the shop. We had a long chat about this that & the other thing, as they say. He's getting married in a couple of months. Have you met the bride? No, but the families are to all get together soon and I'll get a quick glimpse of her -- she'll be the one serving tea. What if you don't like her, what if she's ugly? [smile from the guy] Well, then that's my karma. Then he commented that he's in the shop or school 8AM to 10PM anyhow and asleep almost all the rest of the time. (People have very hard lives here.) He packaged up the three pieces in a cardboard box (well padded with newspaper) and someone came in and sewed it up in burlap which we sealed with wax and mailed to ourselves in Delhi the next day, on the way to Kanchipuram and Madras, by car.

Part 2: Mahabalipuram