Incredible India

Imagine today going into an ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman or Mayan temple and seeing a ceremony performed exactly as it was done thousands of years ago.  This is what you see today in temples such as Brihadishwara in Tanjore.  Ceremonies performed there today were being performed when temples in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and southern Mexico were still in use, by priests who are descendents of those from ancient times.

But the gods of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Mexico are long dead; their ceremonies, chants and prayers forgotten in the mists of time.  Their temples are ruins for tourists and historians. The gods and temples of Hindu India, however, are as alive today as they were in antiquity.  Only in Tamil Nadu, India can you see a classic civilization in action.  This, to me, is the great thing about this place and why it was my favorite spot on our trip. 

A couple of times, in temples off the tourist route, Amy and I were invited into the dark sanctum sanctorum by the Brahmin priest, himself a descendent of the ancient priests, to see him perform the age-old ceremony…waving candles, chants in the original Sanskrit, the pouring of ghee and water over the lingum and the dabbing of sacred ash on our foreheads.  The sound, sight, smell and color of all this was remarkable and I felt something unique here.   Knowing that this exact same experience was had by people thousands of years ago was exciting and a feeling, or maybe an energy of some kind, enveloped me and I felt being transported back in time.

But a feeling of being in another time is not unique to the temples.  Where as in other parts of India much of the old farmland in the countryside has been developed into new neighborhoods full of high rises, call centers, fancy apartments and new businesses, in South India it is still mostly rural, unchanged from ancient times.  There are no fancy malls here, but there still exists villages with small roadside shops, coffee stalls and dirt roads. Villagers leave their newly harvested grain on the road to be threshed by passing cars.  It is in the south that you see the age old tradition of bronze casting performed exactly the same way, by the same families, for thousands of years.  It is here in South India that you can walk through a marketplace and be overwhelmed by the sights and smells that amazed the Romans and Greeks when they traded here millennia ago.

I loved everywhere we went and we chose our route well.  We were fortunate to choose South India as our first visit to this country, thanks in large part to advice from our friends Shuba and Ananth, who helped us a lot with choosing the places to visit.  Not only Tamil Nadu, but Kerela, where we could relax on the backwaters in a small village and and way up in the mountains on a coffee/tea/beetlenut plantation, seeing elephants working on their farms pulling out large tree trunks to the roadside and ancient Jain temples in the forest.  And Mysore, where we saw the 400^th anniversary of the great Dusara procession, which had elephants carrying great howdahs on their backs, transporting the descendant of the last Majaraja. Marketplaces are full of ancient shops run by the same families for generations.  Kashmiri shopkeepers all competing for your business, some quite annoying, others quite charming with great sales techniques.  Afterall, we bought a Kashmir rug from one of them!

After many years of avoiding India, because of all the stories of dirt, robberies and worse, we finally said to hell with that and went.  And it turned out to be one of our greatest trips ever.  We will come back someday, maybe next time to the far north, to the Himalayan states of Ladakh or Sikkim.  I can’t wait to again experience the crazy, honking traffic, the smiling faces, the odd head wobbles, the tasty food, the roaming cows, the ancient traditions, the great, old temples, the chanting priests, the busy markets, the friendly people.  The sights, smells, sounds that can only be found here.  Incredible India indeed!