THE SCENE IN THE MADURA TEMPLE.
Two gopuras constitute the great entrances. Through one of these I went, with a crowd of about fifty ill-clad beggars following me. They held high carnival as they passed around and against me, and called for alms. I noticed many sleepers in the darker corners, in various parts of the temple spaces. They lie in every position. It seems a habit of the Maduran when he gets thoroughly tired in his tent, or in the bazar, to drop into this temple and fall down for a good nap at the feet of Shiva, or some other idol, for Madura is a spot which for ages has been held strangely sacred by the Hindoo worshiper. Having passed through the gopura, and completed the passage of the great corridor, you see the beginnings only of this wonderful temple. There stretch out before you great reaches of passages, and halls, and still farther corridors, in all possible directions. But for my safe guide, who added to his other duties the good one of keeping off the crowd of ragged and starving and ill-smelling beggars with a stout bamboo rod, I should have lost my way at once. At your right you see an immense hall, the Hall of One Thousand Columns, which extends far away until it is lost in such dark and distant spaces as I cared not to explore. But, beyond it—for I came back that way—there is a special temple sacred to the ruling god, Shiva. At your left are venders of images, sweetmeats, toys, and various other articles, which, for some reason, are permitted to be sold within the sacred walls. The men who sell them are squatted over the floor, on mats of palm, and their wares lie about them. Think of a seller of small wares, in a temple, sitting or standing, with his goods arranged on a counter or row of shelves! Such a thing would be preposterous beyond measure. The drift is downward. No Hindoo will stand if he can possibly drop on the floor. He doubles up his legs under him. That is his normal position. He may be talking with you this moment, and as much interested in standing or walking as any one. But a sudden change comes over him. Down he drops, and no boy ever closed the two blades of a jack-knife more quickly than the Hindoo doubles himself up, either on the temple floor, or at the side of the street, or in his own doorway. And there he can sit by the hour, nay, the whole day, and be as calm as the serene face of Buddha himself.
Perhaps these sellers in the Madura Pagoda have some ancestral claim on the favors of the authorities, by which they receive the privilege of spreading out their wares in the holy place. Over your head there flies about a flock of doves. They are sacred, and woe to the hand that would hurt a feather on their sweet heads! The worshipers feed them. It is a sacred privilege. Yonder, to your left, three sacred elephants are feeding and frisking their trunks about as if they really knew that they were picking up great wisps of straw and hay within the most holy place in all this region. Come, I must hasten, or their priestly keepers will loosen the chains of one of them in a trice, and have the mammoth dropping down on all fours, and pulling me up on his back, to take an elephant ride through this labyrinth of marvels. Imagine the absurdity of an elephant ride on a temple floor! Yet that is what you can do here, and take a long promenade, and never have him repeat his pathway. I have had two elephant rides, and want no more for a decade, at least. But by going through this first doorway I get away from the venders, and the elephants, and pass out of sight of the Hall of a Thousand Columns, and its great, interminable spaces. Here one is in a corridor nearly two hundred feet long, with pillars groaning beneath a wealth of sculptured images. Now comes a brazen door. The frame is vast and heavy, and is entirely surrounded with brazen lamps, all of which are lighted during a festive season, perhaps the Tailotsava, “the oil festival.”
Monier Williams happened to visit the Madura Pagoda at the time of the “oil festival,” and thus describes the wretched scene: “A coarse image of the goddess (Minakshi), profusely decorated with jewels, and having a high head-dress of hair, was carried in the center of a long procession, on a canopied throne, borne by eight Brahmans, to a platform in the magnificent hall, opposite the temple. There the ceremony of undressing the idol, removing its ornaments, anointing its head with oil, bathing, redecorating and redressing it was gone through, and shouting, singing, beating of tom-toms, waving of lights and cowries, ringing of bells, and deafening discord from forty or fifty so-called musical instruments, each played by a man who did his best to overpower the sound of all the others combined. At the head of the procession was borne an image of Ganesa. Then followed three elephants, a long line of priests, musicians, attendants bearing cowries and umbrellas, with a troop of dancing girls bringing up the rear.
“No sight I witnessed in India made me more sick at heart than this. It presented a sad example of the utterly debasing character of the idolatry which, notwithstanding the counteracting influences of education and Christianity, still enslaves the masses of the population, deadening their intellects, corrupting their imaginations, warping their affections, perverting their consciences, and disfiguring the fair soil of a beautiful country with hideous usages and practices unsanctioned by even their own minds and works.”—“Religious Thought and Life in India.” Part I, pp. 442-443.
You are now introduced into a darker corridor, and then again into a broad and pillared space, where the columns are sculptured, being cut through and through into figures of dancing gods, like Shiva when he played his flute to the shepherds. You now look out upon a little sheet of water with a miniature temple in the middle of it. This is the Lake of the Golden Lilies. Near by it is the little chapel where Queen Mangammal’s subjects starved her to death in 1706, having placed food so near that she could see and smell it, but not taste it. We now enter another department of the temple; above there are stone images, up around the pillars, in all corners, and hanging down over you wherever you go, near walls or archways. These images are not grave and majestic, but, in the main, grotesque, bacchanalian, in fantastic attitudes, and often combining the bodies of man and beast. They represent, for the most part, the escapades of Shiva. Every now and then one comes to a shrine, where worshipers lie prostrate before it, and remain motionless for a long time. No one knows how long it has taken these poor dusty pilgrims to reach this sacred place. Perhaps they have been three months on the journey. They come from the very base of the Himalayas, or the borders of Thibet, and now that they have reached the end of their pilgrimage, would die with a happy heart. There are several gold plated images, veiled from view, which represent the god Shiva, or his wife, in some part of their marvelous career. The representations in stone, both of men and the brute world, are frequent everywhere. Elephants, horses, cattle, and every kind of animal held sacred in the Hindoo mythology, are cut out of stone, and made to portray the supposed divine attributes of Shiva and his wife. Here, too, are the very vehanas, or great chariots, plated with gold, in which the god and his wife are taken out on special days in the year, to ride. Beside these there are silver litters, which serve the same divine purpose on other days.
One grows weary of the procession of splendid but gross images and idols in this vast space. Now you are out for a time in the open air, where a vacancy has been left in the roof, and the beautiful sky throws down its blessed sunlight upon this terrible picture of idolatry. But very soon you are brought again under the shadowing and lofty ceiling, and before you are aware of it, you are almost lost in a dark labyrinth of sculptured pillars, black idols in gold wrappings, dusty and absorbed pilgrims, cheerful doves, and the constant crowd of men and boys, who follow you, either to sell you their sweets, or beg for your loose coppers. All at once you come out from a corridor to the marble steps of a miniature lake. Be careful now. Only the real Hindoo dares to step down into its waters. For every drop is sacred, and must touch only the skin of Shiva’s children. Over the calm surface the towers stand as gay sentinels, from century to century. Turning again, you must look carefully, or you will tread upon a sleeping form, which has dropped in from the hot air, and let fall its burden, and eaten its crust, and now rests an hour. There is a mother, with a nose-ring so large that it hangs down over her mouth, and she must eat through it, or starve. Her ankles are encircled by heavy silver anklets, cut like serpents. Her toes are glittering with jeweled rings. She has led her child up before an image of Shiva’s wife, and is explaining what it all means. Poor woman! Little she knows the truth. The One Name above all others she has never once heard. Here is a dwarf, who stands beside a shrine, and holds out his withered hand for an anna. Here, in a place where the statuary has given way to the wear of ages, are workmen in stone, who are making new pillars, with sculptured flutings, to take the place of the old. All the work, every stroke of mallet and chisel, must be done right here, where everything is holy, and Shiva smiles down upon the labor.
Anecdote of Jerrold.—His heart was as kindly a one as ever beat in a human bosom; and his hand most liberal, and often far more liberal than his means might have justified. He was once asked by a literary acquaintance, whether he had the courage to lend him a guinea. “Oh, yes,” he replied, “I’ve got the courage; but I haven’t got the guinea.” He had always the courage to do a kind action, and when he had the guinea it was always at the command of the suffering, especially if the sufferer was an honest laborer in the field of literature.—“Personal Traits of British Authors.”