From Tranquebar we largely retraced our steps to the inland city of Thanjavur (Tanjore). Sitting next to us on the bus was a young man from Chennai (Madras), the capital city of Tamil Nadu further up the coast. He was returning to his home region on a short break from his job as an IT engineer with the English clothing company Marks & Spencer that manages its worldwide computer networks and financial systems from Madras. We chatted with him for awhile and he told us he’d been to London twice with his job and was a very keen cricketer – an all-rounder.In Tanjore we caught an auto-rickshaw into the town centre and after finding the Hotel Gnanam full, pounded the footpath for a few more hot and bothering minutes before finding a room at the Ramnath. As elsewhere the streets here are narrow strips of bitumen with dirt footpaths – a rope pinned to the edge of the road delineates the two. Again all the available surface was shared by a noisy, slightly dusty, melee of people, vehicles and animals.
By now a few common themes were beginning to emerge for us from our initial time in India. The people are friendly and welcoming, the culture is rich, the food is excellent (the hotels much less so), and from our observation of TV ads and street billboards it seems that the major preoccupations of Indians are the education of young people, politics and shampoo, not necessarily in that order.
And then there’s the public urination. Any slightly shaded walkways off the main shopping streets, particularly ones bordered with a wall, are used by many (not all) men as public urinals. While this doesn’t particularly bother us, the stench is sometimes very bad, causing people to have to walk out on the road with the buses rather than use the walking path provided. And speaking of buses, they all have a large Armageddon-heralding air horn fitted that the driver uses constantly to clear a path. They work to incredibly small tolerances in avoiding collisions, making no allowance for any unexpected movement by other vehicle, person or beast. Several times we were totally mystified how what seemed to be a looming inevitable pedestrian fatality resolved itself at the last microsecond into a mere harmless puff of dust, the uninjured though shaken ped receding rapidly in the the bus’ rear vision mirror. Of course it doesn’t always end as harmlessly as this – I read there are 85,000 road accident deaths annually in India.
The aforementioned are not the only drawcards that lure so many foreign visitors to Tanjore. The major attraction is the fabulous Brihadishwara temple and fort, the crowning glory of Chola temple architecture commissioned in 1010 AD by Rajaraja. It’s a grand sandstone edifice adorned with colourful murals and fine sculptures that erupt into a red glow at sunset. This temple, along with the Airatesvara we saw in Dharasuram and one other, are jointly listed on the World Heritage Register – the Great Living Chola Temples. While walking around, surveying the different garb of people of different faiths, I wondered whether some muslim women clothed in all black sometimes envy their Hindu sisters dressed in their colourful saris and sporting garlands of jasmine in their hair. "Why do Hindus have all the fun?" might be the unmouthed question.
Nearby and also worth a visit is the crumbling, pigeon-infested Thanjavur Royal Palace & Museums. Although much of the complex is decayed, a few sections still convey the sense of opulence in which the ancient South Indian royalty lived. The complex also houses an extensive collection of fabulous Chola bronzes – there was one in particular that practicalities aside, we would loved to have taken home with us.
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