Pondicherry via Chidambaram

14th January, 2019 – Chidambaram and Pondicherry

We set off for our two nights in Pondicherry but detoured via Chidambaram, which was good as it had been the subject of a fair amount of the book by Michael Wood, ‘A South Indian Journey’ that Val and I had read, so in a way we felt we knew quite a lot about it already, though we were not going to be able to immerse ourselves in it as he did as we only had a morning to see the sights.

We were a day away from Pongol, the harvest festival and the need to get the sugar cane home was growing intense…

Chidambaram is one of the holiest Hindu sites as it is where Shiva performed his cosmic dance as Nataraja, the King of the Dance and, as you might have guessed, there is a temple dedicated to it, the Sabhanayaka Nataraja Temple. Legend has it that King Hiranyavarman performed a pilgrimage here from Kashmir, to find a cure for his leprosy. This he did find by bathing in the temple’s tank. He was so pleased, he enlarged the temple and brought in 3,000 brahmins of the Dikshitar caste. Their descendants, distinguishable by top-knots of hair at the front of their heads are the ritual specialists of the temple to this day.

The temple has the usual huge gopuras set in a 55 acre complex divided by 4 concentric walls. The oldest parts were built by the Cholas and unusually, the temple is privately owned (most temples in Tamil Nadu are state-funded) and dependent on pilgrims’ donations. One of the first sights we saw were the enormous chariots that are used in the Car Festival processing along the 4 Car streets surrounding the temple.

We entered through one of the gopuras with its usual array of fantastical gods, goddesses and other figures.

There were some interesting characters…..

And, of course there is a fabulous array of carving and buildings to savour.

And finally, a random selection of photos that don’t seem to fit any of the categories above…

All very fascinating and much enlivened by our very nice and mildly eccentric guide, Balu, who had a wonderful sense of humour, is a brahmin and walked with a crutch due to a fall. Sadly I did not take a photo of him, but he was the sort of person you could happily spend more than a day with.

It was time to head off again, through a definite rice bowl area to Pondicherry.

Now we had had a bit of a saga about our accommodation at Pondicherry as the previous evening I had received a message from our tour company that the hotel we were due to stay at, Maison Perumal, which we had booked back in July, 2018, had announced that they could not now afford us a room – all this within 24 hours of us turning up. Initially the tour company suggested we head north to Mahabalapuram first and then return to Pondicherry 2 days later and then head north again, but that would have involved considerably more driving and so, after a lot of calls and toing and froing, we booked ourselves into what is apparently one of the top places to stay in Pondicherry, La Villa. We are still working on refunds/compensation, but we certainly could not complain about our new hotel. It only has 6 or 8 rooms, I think, is very luxurious and the food was some of the best I have ever eaten (the chef is from Paris), so we have not suffered much, as you can see!

Pondicherry – or Puducherry to give it its new name is certainly a bit different having been a French enclave in the British Raj and only joining the rest of India in 1954, 7 years after independence and it is actually a Union Territory. The older part is split in two by a canal with Ville Noire being the preserve of the Indians and Ville Blanche that of the French (the British used to do something similar in many of their towns in India). The town had been known to Greek and Roman geographers as ‘Poduke’and was an important staging-post on the maritime trade between Rome and the Far East (a Roman amphitheatre has been unearthed nearby).

Val and I went for a walk down to the promenade along the beach looking out over the Bay of Bengal. Note the uniforms of the policemen!

And so to bed, with a fabulous dinner inside us and another exciting day tomorrow