kumbakonam

Kumbakonam...
Well the wideish streets of Kumbakonam are a grid of dirty dishevelled and or dilapidated buildings all in a low higgledy piggledy up both sides... the disjointed rooflines of first second and third floor high shops and houses and offices... usually square rooved but some even thatched ... with yet more inevitable gopurams, [at one stage simply everyone must’ve had to had one]...so its a likeable place ... partly because of the high number of temples, like Chiang Mai or Lampang... but mainly because of the colour and bustle sprawling out from the shopfronts.... a bustle increasing with the heat... as this is yet another slow-morning city, like Mysore, where, at nine the streets are empty, but at four they’re packed...the market stalls and dark powercut interiors and fruit stalls and flower stalls and stainless steel metal bowl stalls and tat stalls and electrical shops and chai stalls and cake shops... and the mass of people buying selling standing walking, the cars and bikes and mopeds and rickshaws... the great sense of everyday activity, of life lived in its own way, within whatever confines its set, confines to thrive in ... with the chatter and yells and temple music and traffic and more yells and whooping and whistling and singing and barking...
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To move into the temple... past the small first gopuram, on the main street... up the small street of shops towards the temple proper and the high towered entrance, or gopuram... [this smallish city of18 temples has more gopurams than anywhere else i’ve been... they are the coloured half of its prickly skyline ...so that G word is going to keep cropping up] ... with, by that first littler gopuram, an ornately carved wooden temple car with huge wide wheels ... the biggest and most elaborate car i’ve seen... of any sort... so big it can’t fit inside the temple gate and so is out in the street under a ramshackle wooden roof ... the car is how they take the statues of gods around during festivals, so some of them have to be very big... and this one is so big they have a map of it inside the temple, showing [we think] the meaning of each of the dozens of carvings on the car... because its has five or six three-foot high levels or layers of intricate carving, each scene two-or-so feet wide with men and women, swords and breasts, lions and elephants, deaths and triumphs... and, moving along the small street to the temple itself, a twelfth century Chola temple to Shiva, where the entrance, the highest gopuram, has thousands of figures carved into many levels ... all painted... the biggest being more of those strange lion heads which look like mythic squids ...maybe they never had lions here so they are also mythic...which explains how unlionlike they are ... with, beneath them, curved lines of serpent heads and godheads... and maybe next to that a large god figure, stood on one leg with the other crossed over... or six female figures beneath a green and godded tree... with dozens of these scenes on all four sides of the tower... bulls and serpents and lotus leaves and trumpeters and archers and... and... as i move across the first empty space to the pillared space beneath the high stone roof... the air cool, the stone old, the space cool and old ... the pillared hall being a mandapam with carved and painted flowers and floral mandalas on the floor... and conventional but highly coloured, bold paintings on the walls ... and 12 inch thick ropes coiled on the level above the short steps... and the pillars themselves, some carved into the shapes of greek pillars, some with detailed horse-shapes and body-shapes carved into them... with an altar, then another, then a six foot stone base to a high metal holy pillar, the base of the metal with long dry grass tied round it... to move through the next stone doorway... the gate of wooden and metal-grille... into the next bigger pillared chamber... with cars and carved fairground horses behind cages... and more gods, bedecked in cloth and garland... and more altars... and bells and cymbals and smoking incense and bells on doors... and a small temple devoted to a black stoned lingam...and gilt gods in the darkness... and carvings on the walls and steps and pillars, some detailed some crude... and ramshackle ladders and rusting powerpoints and metal wires extruding from the concrete ...and then a cowshed with ten or so cows... and through another door where men sit singing and knots of talking fervent youths flit by... and here is the inner sanctum, where non hindus can’t go, so i circle around... more carving and altars and figurines and flickering candles and singing and chanting and sullied walls and carved pillars and gilt gods in the darkness ... and i drift off out back to the main street... to head to the next big temple, just around the corner, this one to Shiva ...
And its easy to find, its got a tall and highly gopuram

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