If you are still not shaken by the disaster that is looming, please look for the signs the next time you happen to visit a heritage site yourself. Or come with me to the Meenakshi-Sundareswarar temple at Madurai, which is now competing for the status of the seventh wonder of the world. There are already internet appeals to back the case for what is not only one of our greatest pieces of architecture but also one of the holiest Hindu temples.
But you walk in through any of the spectacular entrances and chances are you would wonder if you have come into one of the finest temples built in the history of mankind, or a makeshift bazaar. Right along the temple alleys leading to the 12 gopurams you have shops on both sides, selling everything, from the usual curios and souvenirs to buckets, brooms, bags, spices, soaps and oils, shaving brushes, Made in China flashlights, underwear and banyans, almost anything you might need in the course of a day. What, you wonder, is this supermarket doing in the bowels of a temple that now claims, quite deservedly, to compete with the Taj Mahal and others for the title of the seventh wonder?
The shops not only defile the sanctity and beauty of the temple, they also litter and pollute. Nails are unhesitatingly hammered into Kulasekhara Pandya’s ancient walls, remade in their present grandeur by the Nayaks in the 16th-17th centuries ‘ to hang signboards, poster, calendars, even clotheslines. But what is most heart-breaking is to see ancient statues and sculptures that line the walkways sometimes used as props to hang merchandise, and sometimes as mannequins. Empty cartons are junked by the side, sometimes even in front. Cows and people sprawl, sharing the pathways with splashes of dung.
If we want this temple to have a realistic shot at the seventh wonder status, somebody needs to do some real cleaning up quickly. The local authorities will tell you their hands are tied. The shopkeepers have “hereditary” rights and cannot be removed as mere squatters. Besides, the moment you try to touch them it becomes a local political issue. If there has ever been a plan to “buy” them out, nobody knows.
The walkway ultimately leads you into one of the most remarkable features in the temple complex, the so-called thousand-pillar hall and it is a real thing. An endless stone ceiling resting on row after row of ornately sculptured stone pillars (985, in fact). Walk into the middle and look around. It is one of the most spectacular sights you would find anywhere in the world. And what has the temple management done with it? They have converted it into a museum which is not the ideal thing to do, but acceptable, if only the “museum” looked anything like you’d expect it to be.
There are random, poorly labelled exhibits piled into wooden show windows with soiled glazing and decaying sides. You even see one most distressing exhibit, some attire worn by the deity, now fully eaten by termites, a few strands of the clothing still hanging on top of a heap of dust. Sure enough, there is a sign on the window saying, delicate, do not touch! Delicate indeed, it is now dust.
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You come out of the other side and, across the bustling street, between a garment and a fruit juice shop, you see the entrance into what looks like another spectacular, multi-pillared hall. The pillars are huge, ornately cut and support, in a manner typical of the old southern temple architecture, not just the ceiling but also a legion of yalis and animal forms in larger-than-life sculptures. When I got there I saw new harnesses and scaffoldings all over the place and I thought, finally, here is something that is being restored. Somebody has begun to take care. Then I asked a busy-looking man carrying a hammer and looking purposefully at the medieval granite walls around him, what was going on. Bazaar, he said. The “authorities” had rented the place for two weeks for a bazaar of garments, cheap underclothes and knick-knacks. If you still want not to lose heart you can look at it differently. What a great tourist attraction it would be, a temporary bazaar inside a medieval temple hall!
All around, in the streets leading to the temple, you find marvellous old houses defiled, or being broken down to be replaced by the new concrete slab-and-brick constructions. You can only imagine what the whole place would look like if somebody undertook one year’s restoration and clean-up and it won’t even cost many tens of crores.
If you think Madurai is not heart-breaking enough, come to yet another eternal holy site of the south, Brihadiswara, Rajaraja Chola’s massive 10th century Shiva temple, which has graced millions of picture postcards, stamps, almost any brochure wooing tourists to India. It is an architectural marvel, whose 80-tonne capstone was hauled up a four km earthern ramp, like for the Pyramids, a place to rival the best in the world. Yet, what are the words that greet you as you enter through its main gate? “Letrin” (sic), says the crudely painted sign, directing you to go left. Not particularly aesthetically done, you think, but at least somebody has bothered about building toilets at a tourist spot. What you see, instead, is a tiny room with a hole in the floor and if you use it your footwear would smell for a long time. And to use it you pay one rupee to a man in a kiosk of sorts under a small tent, filled with his table, chair, cash box and, I wonder how and why, a very quiet Doberman tied to the table.
Still, probably relieved, as you enter the temple complex, and the expanse and the grandeur of it becomes evident, your first sight is also that of the scooter and bicycle stand that the ASI has apparently licensed to be set up inside the temple complex. And then, when you go deeper still, into the main concourse dominated by the 6 m long, 3.7 m high Nandi, carved from a single 25-tonne rock (although putting a back-lit sign saying Nandi in cheap plastic on top of the sculpture is not such a great idea), you think at least this part is still in reasonable shape. No shops, no squatters, no filth. And then you look at the parikrama where, in typical southern tradition, you would expect to find rows of sculpture in continuous walkways. You do find some sculpture, but mostly you find bags of cement and debris, concrete mixers, other tools and junk. These are areas from where old idols have disappeared, or removed into storage for repair and restoration and meanwhile the ASI is using these as a junk yard instead.
You can go around the country, from the Sun Temple in Konark to even Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, from Hampi to Bodhgaya, and from the Taj Mahal to the Jagannath temple in Puri, and find the same story of callousness and neglect repeated. That this gravely damages our tourism potential is only a small part of the problem. It is a case of a rapidly prospering India destroying what our much poorer ancestors left behind for us so lovingly. That is why we believe this series of investigative reports, Health of our Heritage, put together by a large team of Express reporters and photographers from around the country, is one of our most significant in a long time.
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