A Trip to the South Coast

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at Pondicherry University for two days last week. I flew from Delhi to Chennai (formerly Madras) and then took a scenic three hour drive along the Indian Ocean coast to Pondicherry. I did my reading in advance and so had the driver stop in Chennai at the Kapeeleswarar Temple and the tomb of St. Thomas, then on to a fantastic world heritage site, the Shore Temples and 5 Rathas at Mahaballipuram.

The temple at Chennai is a large, multicolored tower covered with dancing, posing, warring, and meditating gods and goddesses. Like all of these sites, you must remove your shoes to enter. There were several shrine areas and some available volunteer guides to explain matters to the uninitiated. Non-Hindus were not allowed in one of the central worship room but the rest we could view fairly closely. There were many devotees filing past the priests asking for blessings and receiving a red smudge and a white ash smudge on the forehead. Two Hindu weddings were just concluding and a crowd of poor people were assembling for the free lunch. A Hindu temple is a busy place!

The tomb of St. Thomas who reported came to India in the first century AD and was martyred here is near the temple. It's a plain Catholic church with an attached musuem and a chapel near the tomb in the basement of the museum. The devotees here, some prostrating themselves on the floor, were similar in every regard to the devotees in the Hindu temple. The iconography and the stations of the cross inside the church were very reminiscent of the cast of characters and stories told of the lives of the gods at the temple. It certainly makes one think long and hard about all beliefs.

It was striking as we drove out of Chennai that Catholic and other Christian churches are common along the coastline. So, 2000 years later, it's clear that one disciple came along and left an imprint on this Hindu culture that still quite discernible.

The villages along the highway in the south are so scenic. The people live in simple hand crafted shacks as they do in the encampments in Delhi, but here the homes are made of palms leaves and palm wood. Their appearance has a tropical feeling that's more pleasing to the eye than their urban counterparts.











The Mahaballipuram site is a stunning sight. It's an elaborately carved structure jutting out into the ocean, surrounded by a sea wall, palm trees, and clear blue skies.

It was built between 600-700 AD. The architecture is clearly influenced by East Asian design motifs (like the lions shown here). The kings sent architects to the East (Cambodia, Thailand, and China) to bring back this new style of building.

The amazing part about the amazing shore temple and its surrounding 50 bull statues is that there were SIX other shore temples and 30 more bulls at the same site. All are now underwater because of shore erosion or washed out to sea, in the case of the bulls. Divers can see them, intact and standing, under 200 feet of ocean. Hard to believe!


The remaining shore temple would have been destroyed by the Asian tsunami of 2005 if the government hadn't built a seawall in 2000. The tsunami killed about 3,000 people, mostly fishermen and their families, right in this area of shoreline.

After the lovely drive along the coast we arrived at Pondicherry, a former French outpost and bustling commercial town. I gave two lectures at the university here and otherwise enjoyed a pleasant 3 day beach side stay. I found that everyone walks along the ocean front sidewalk in the early morning hours. I went in my running shorts and sleeveless t-shirt (knowing that the high would be 90 and the low 70 degrees) and almost caused a riot. Not really, but there wasn't a person who didn't stare. It takes great discipline on my part not to make eye contact and just ignore what I'm seeing with my peripheral vision. In Delhi I wouldn't think of wearing shorts, but at the beach I figured they've seen it all. Well, if they hadn't seen a woman in shorts before, they have now.

Along with my graduate student guide, I visited a nearby commune of sorts, called Aurobindo. It's a cult-like but benevolent society with a cosmology and religion all of its own. One has to watch a video (indoctrination video) before being allowed to walk to the giant gold sphere that is the concentration point of cosmic energy and site of much meditation. I was underwhelmed by the philosophy but completely pleased by the delicious vegetarian fare they served!

One last word about the trip to Pondicherry: I was hosted to dinner at the home of an Sri Lankan exile whose four children are now professionals in the U.S. (how this dinner came to be is a long story...). She and a friend of hers, Parmilla, offered to take me jewelry shopping in the evening. After we returned at 10:00pm, my driver and I took Parmilla around to her home. Nothing would do but that we would come in at that hour. The house consisted of a wide hallway, a bedroom, and roughly made kitchen with a cooking pit on the floor, and full room for the home altar. Ten people make up the household. The children scrambled up off their straw mats on the floor as we entered. We were offered hot, sweet milk, warmed up over the kitchen fire. They opened the door to the house prayer room. I'm so glad I knew not enough to enter, but to stand at the door and admire it. The centerpiece of it was a yellow painted rock with a face drawn on it, and a red rock as a topknot, surrounded by other Hindu statues and pictures. It was a colorful sight to behold, and obviously of great importance to the family. They devote at least 1/5 of their house space to it.

It was a very memorable three day trip to the South!