As the new year approaches, I am reminded of the trip my husband and I made this time last year. It had been a long-time wish of ours to visit some of the temples in South Tamil Nadu. We started off one night in the last week of December with a one-way ticket to Thanjavur. We didn't make any concrete plans for after that - we only knew we had to be back by Jan 2nd, so we could start work again from the 3rd.
The metre-gauge train got into Thanjavur on a rainy cold morning. We walked to the nearby Hotel Tamil Nadu only to find out that all standard rooms had been booked. Eventually we found a hotel very near the Periya Kovil (the famous Brihadeeswarar temple) that was reasonable and comfortable. Our first stop was of course the magnificent example of Chola architecture built almost a thousand years ago by the king Raja Raja.
Though both of us had
been to the temple before, it was an awesome experience walking through the
huge entrance again and exploring the many different annexes and parts of
the glorious old temple. Perhaps because it is an ASI preserved monument,
it is pretty well maintained in spite of the visitors it gets every day. We
spent a few hours taking in the beauty of the temple, a lot of the time getting
under our umbrella when it rained. The structure looked even more stunning
drenched in rain. Pity, we didn't have a camera, but then these are not sights
that one is likely to forget in a long time, photographs or not.
After refreshing ourselves with some delicious prasadam from the temple food stall, we walked around the city a little. We found a book exhibition in a small rundown government library and even picked up a Crichton there, apart from two books on Thanjavur and Chola architecture.
Post lunch saw us visiting the other sightseeing places in Thanjavur - the Serfoji Palace, Museum and the Saraswathi Mahal Library; the last two were closed because it was Ramzan and a national holiday that day. But even from the outside they looked old - yes, they are old but the Periya Kovil is centuries older - and dilapidated and uninteresting. The Palace had some remarkable specimens from the Maratha era, from the personal effects of Serfoji, but the place was damp and musty, and many items on display were unmarked and it was left to one's imagination to decipher their use or value. The front of the Palace had a sad looking store selling handicrafts and trinkets, which was managed by the present day descendents of Serfoji. The family also seemed to be living in one portion of the building and we could see clothes put to dry and other signs of a household inside the erstwhile Palace!
The Durbar Hall, where the Maratha kings received their audiences, was slightly better preserved, but one still had to imagine the full glory and colours of the hall in the past. Or watch it touched up for some movie song (I recently saw a Tamil movie song on TV shot in the hall!) The Arsenal and Bell Towers were quite splendid in terms of architecture.
It was evening and though we wanted to visit the Periya Kovil again, it started raining again, and tired, we retired early. The next morning, we checked out and started out to our next destination: Vedaranyam. We had decided to take the state transport buses for some simple reasons - they were very efficient, frequent and the cheapest mode of travel in inland Tamil Nadu. Vedaranyam was the nearest town to Kodiakkarai (also known as Point Calimere), where we hoped to catch sight of some flamingoes which we heard arrived there in that season.
To be continued...
