Madurai – the ‘Athens of the East’

11th January, 2019 – Madurai, Tamil Nadu

Madurai is one of the oldest cities in South Asia, an important centre of worship and commerce and even gets a mention from the Greek Ambassador, Megasthenes in 302BC and the Roman geographer, Strabo complained that the city’s silk, pearls and spices were draining the imperial coffers at Rome. It became the capital of the Pandyan dynasty for most of the first millennium AD until the Chola dynasty took over, followed by a brief reappearance of the Pandyas, before being taken over as an independent Islamic sultanate for a while. In 1364 joined the Vijayanagar empire until 1565 when the Nayaks asserted their sovereignty, followed by the British in the mid-eighteenth century to independence in 1947. Note that Tamil Nadu, being a Dravidian language state (along with Kerala) feels that it is very different from the rest of India, whose languages are based on Sanskrit and there has even been a call for Tamil independence.

Hope that helps a bit. We shall come across the Cholas again as we travel north again. And I should mention that Madurai is also the subject of an extraordinary number of myths, largely based on Shiva, who shook his matted locks over the city, coating it with a fine sprinkling of ‘amrita’, the nectar of immortality. Maduarai is popularly derived from the Tamil word for sweetness, ‘madhuram’.

Our first site of the day was the Thirumalai Nayak Palace, a seventeenth-century  building, three quarters of which was dismantled by Thirumalai’s grandson to build a new palace elsewhere, but what remains is still impressive possibly largely thanks to restoration work in 1858 by the then governor, Lord Napier and more in 1971. It could do with another bout of help and possibly a hawk or two to deal with the large pigeon population, but the gist of what it must have been like is still there to see in the Swargavilasa or Heavenly Pavilion.

I should mention that it is the Tamil custom to draw a kolam or pattern at the entrance of your house (or palace). You use rice flour, chalk, chalk powder or rock powder to make the patterns and as we were coming up to the very important harvest festival of Pongol, it meant that the kolams were getting more and more elaborate. This was the one at the palace.

We also popped into Palace Museum……

We then headed off for the temple, but not before we had a look at the market streets, with some dedicated to just one type of produce or items, as I hope the photos show!

A good start, but the main attraction of Madurai is massive Sri Meenakshi-Sundareshwara Temple, one of the largest temple complexes in all of India with most of constructed between the 16th and 18th century, though some is much older. There are allegedly 33 million sculptures (I didn’t count them!) and ideally we needed considerably longer than our schedule allowed to explore life of the temple with endless puja ceremonies, music, weddings (but not in January – inauspicious!), the instruction of Brahmin boys in the Vedas, just to mention a few.

We were not allowed to take the camera into the temple, but courtesy of a Kashmiri shop who allowed us to view the complex from their roof. The main thing you see are the outstanding gopuras or gateways, the main ones being at the cardinal points, ie north, east, west and south.

There were some interesting traders and shops in amongst the columns as well as yet another chance to add to my collection of umbrella photos…

Of course flowers are an essential part of going to the temple, so hardly surprisingly, there were plenty of places to buy some.

And finally, a photo to give you an idea of the height of the gopura, one of the more scary gods and some of the 15,000 to 25,000 daily pilgrims on the way to the temple.

And that, folks, was Madurai, a good start on a fascinating insight into Tamil temples and worship, with lots more to come…..