A Guide To The Sacred City Of Kumbakonam

In the Ramaswamy temple, built during the Nayaka times, the sanctum contains the crowned Rama along with Sita, Rama’s brothers and Hanuman. The images are majestic. The prakaram of the Ramaswamy temple has cartoon-like wall paintings illustrating the Ramayana. If you go around the sanctum thrice, as is customary, you can see the entire epic unfold in pictures. The Suryanar temple is a bustling antidote to the vast silence of the other temples. The way in is flanked by vendors of archana baskets, flowers, ghee lamps, and sacred books and beads. Pilgrims who are not able to visit all the nine Navagraha temples take the short cut of visiting the Suryanar temple, which has separate shrines for all the grahas.

A secular shrine that draws many visitors is the Srinivasa Ramanujan House on Sannathi Street near the Sarangapani temple. It is a museum housed in the home where the boy mathematician lived his inly rich life. There is the front room from which he “spent hours staring out of the window”, according to a plaque, and the narrow koodam, puja room and kitchen, all connected by an open corridor that bends like a river. It is hard to know what it is about this austere space that invokes the spirit of one so long gone, but it brings a mist to many a grown-up’s eye. 

Even outside the temples, an inescapable reverence seems to be woven into everything. In the streets around the Sarabeswarar temple live the famed silk weavers of Thirubhuvanam. Most of these families migrated from Saurashtra into the Tamil country in different eras, some as far back as the time of Raja Raja Chola I, a thousand years ago, they say. Out in the streets, they stretch their yarns and tease out the tangles before rolling them up to ready the looms. In the koodam of the weaver M.R. Anandan’s house, a baffling rig of wood and wires shifts and rattles as the weaver pulls his levers. It is a jacquard loom, and each time he pulls the lever a new punched card clacks into place, dropping just the right threads into the brocade and silk pattern of roses forming below. Anandan started working at sari borders at the age of eight, he says, for five or ten rupees a day. His daughters have been educated to follow other professions, but he continues to weave what he considers the auspicious fabric that contains the power of the five elements.

In villages like Thimmakudi, the famed utsava murtis or bronze festival idols of Tamil Nadu are shaped to the same ancient proportions we find to be divine. At Shri Rajan Industries, where artists from the bronze school use the lost wax process to make images for worship or ornamentation, visitors can see how it’s done. Among those at work is R. Srinivasan, who uses just three or four tools, whether he is working on a tiny image or a huge one. In the few minutes it takes him to teach us about hard clay and melting wax, he fashions a lump of wax into an inch-long hand with fingers bent in the graceful kataka mudra. By this gesture Parvati expresses to Shiva, “No matter where or when, I will be waiting for you.” The unexpected romance of his explanation silences us for a moment, and then we go to see the formidable crucibles in which bronze is cooked, and the lumps of Kumbakonam mud in which it gestates before the moulds are broken to release the beginnings of a divinity.

Some of the quieter temples may not be on the pilgrim circuit but are emphatically on the map, and here one can study divinity at leisure. The Airavateswara temple at Darasuram (a Unesco World Heritage Site) is possibly the handsomest temple in the state and worth an entire morning, with a guide if possible. It is impossible to number the beauties of such a place, but one masterpiece is the image of Kannappa Nayanar, just outside the corridor to the sanctum. The hunter who gave his eyes to Shiva wears a cowrie necklace, deerskin skirt, ornate sandals and a smile. Most delightful are the numberless little reliefs, the two-inch Shiva in the urdhva thandava pose, his correspondingly tiny Parvati conceding defeat, the two-inch Durga slaying Mahisha, a rampaging one-inch-tall elephant. The pillars of the mandapam narrate the union of Shiva and Parvati, but they also illustrate the life of this green part of Tamil Nadu, peopled by its warriors, builders, farmers and gods, all within Kumbakonam’s charmed circle.

WHAT TO SEE & DO

• To visit the Navagraha temples, ask your hotel to recommend a taxi. You need two days even for quick visits because most temples close in the afternoons. Three days is just the right duration.
• For silk shopping, Thirubhuvanam’s Sannathi Street is packed with shops, including Thico Silks, run by the weavers’ cooperative society. The bronze artists’ workshop next to Shri Rajan Industries (rajanbronzearts.com) in Thimmakudi village is a good place to see bronze images being made and to buy well-made images. To experience the agricultural power of Kumbakonam, drop in at the Kumbakonam vegetable market, which hums between 3am and 9am, and is said to be the largest in Asia. Or take the kids to see the goshala at the Sri Vittal Rukmini Samsthan (vittalrukmini.org), where they can see an incredible variety of cows close up.
• The Airavateswara temple in Darasuram is not to be missed. Magnificent temples outside Kumbakonam (40–45kms) include the Brihadeswara temple at Thanjavur and the Brihadeswara temple at Gangaikondacholapuram (both Unesco World Heritage Sites), and the 30-acre Thyagaraja temple at Thiruvarur, which has splendid ceiling paintings and an enormous chariot.
• As part of the immersive experience, Mantra Koodam arranges bicycle rides, guided walks or even bullock-cart rides to nearby villages.