(192 feet high.)
CHAPTER XII.
THE SOUTH INDIAN TEMPLES.
Leaving Colombo by steamer one evening in the later part of January, I landed on the sandy flat shores of Tuticorin the next day about noon. The deck was crowded with 250 of the poorest class of Tamils, coolies mostly, with women and children, lying in decent confusion heaped upon one another, passively but sadly enduring the evil motion of the ship and the cold night air. One man, nameless, unknown, and abjectly thin, died in the night and was cast overboard. I was the only Englishman on board beside the captain and officers. Said the second officer, “Well, I would rather have these fellows than a lot of English emigrants. The lowest class of English are the damnedest, dirtiest, etceteraest etceteras in the world.”
Tuticorin is a small place with a large cotton mill, several Roman Catholic churches and chapels, relics of Portuguese times, and a semi-christianised semi-wage-slaving native population. From there to Madras is about two days by rail through the great plains of the Carnatic, which stretch between the sea-shore and the Ghauts—long stretches of sand and scrub, scattered bushes and small trees, and the kittool palm; paddy at intervals where the land is moister, and considerable quantities of cotton on the darker soil near Tuticorin; mud and thatch villages under clumps of coco-palm (not such fine trees as in Ceylon); and places of village worship—a portico or shrine with a great clay elephant or half-circle of rude images of horses facing it; the women working in the fields or stacking the rice-straw in stacks similar to our corn-stacks; the men drawing water from their wells to run along the irrigation channels, or in some cases actually carrying the water in pots to pour over their crops!
These plains, like the plains of the Ganges, have been the scene of an advanced civilization from early times, and have now for two thousand years at any rate been occupied by the Tamil populations. Fergusson in his History of Architecture speaks of thirty great Dravidian temples to be found in this region, “any one of which must have cost as much to build as an English cathedral.” I visited three, those of Mádura, Tanjore, and Chidámbaram; which I will describe, taking that at Tanjore first, as having the most definite form and plan.
I have already (chap. VII.) given some account of a smaller Hindu temple. The temples in this region are on the same general plan. There is no vast interior as in a Western cathedral, but they depend for their effect rather upon the darkness and inaccessibility of the inner shrines and passages, and upon the gorgeous external assemblage of towers and porticos and tanks and arcades brought together within the same enclosure. At Mádura the whole circumference of the temple is over 1,000 yards, and at Sri Rungam each side of the enclosure is as much as half a mile long. In every case there has no doubt been an original shrine of the god, round which buildings have accumulated, the external enclosure being thrown out into a larger and larger circumference as time went on; and in many cases the later buildings, the handsome outlying gateways or gópuras and towers, have by their size completely dwarfed the shrine to which they are supposed to be subsidiary, thus producing a poor artistic effect.
TEMPLE AT TANJORE, GENERAL VIEW.
(Portico with colossal bull on the right, priests’ quarters among trees on the left.)
In the temple at Tanjore the great court is 170 yards long by 85 wide. You enter through a gateway forming a pyramidal structure 40 or 50 feet high, ornamented with the usual carved figures of Siva and his demon doorkeepers, and find yourself in a beautiful courtyard, flagged, with an arcade running round three sides, the fourth side being occupied by priests’ quarters; clumps of coco-palms and other trees throw a grateful shade here and there; in front of you rises the great pyramidal tower, or pagoda, 190 feet high, which surmounts the main shrine, and between the shrine and yourself is an open portico on stone pillars, beneath which reposes a huge couchant bull, about six yards long and four yards high, said to be cut from a solid block of syenite brought 400 miles from the quarries. This bull is certainly very primitive work, and is quite brown and saturated with constant libations of oil; but whether it is 2,700 years old, as the people here say, is another question. The difficulty of determining dates in these matters is very great; historical accuracy is unknown in this land; and architectural style gives but an uncertain clue, since it has probably changed but little. Thus we have the absurdity that while natives of education and intelligence are asserting on the one hand that some of these temples are five or even ten thousand years old, the Western architects assert equally strongly that they can find no work in them of earlier date than 1000 A.D., while much of it belongs to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Probably the architects are in the main right. It is quite probable however that the inner shrines in most of these cases are extremely old, much older than 1000 A.D.; but they are so buried beneath later work, and access to them is so difficult, and if access were obtained their more primitive style would so baffle chronology, that the question must yet remain undetermined.