Wow, look at all these wonderful characters! This is a beautiful gopuram! The photo reflects a portion of a typical monumental tower at the entrance to a temple grounds and it’s carved with a tiny fraction of the millions of gods of the Hindu pantheon. I especially love that delightfully mustachioed fellow is in the corner–the one with his head tilted at the bottom left of the gopuram–who, it turns out, was a landowner/farmer who contributed to the construction of the gopuram!
This particular gopuram is at Kapaleeshwarar Temple, in the Mylapore area of Chennai, and it is an excellent example of 7th century Dravidian style. Kapaleeshwarar, as I understand it, is a form of Shiva, and the Mylapore neighborhood gets its name from when Parvati, Shiva’s consort, worshipped him there in the form of a peacock–for which the Tamil is “Mayil arparikum oor.” Of course the early Brit traders couldn’t pronounce all that, so they shortened it to Mylapore.
The temple grounds include a tank, or reservoir, and are surrounded by narrow and crowded streets where sellers offer jasmine wreaths and bracelets and trinkets and sweets–and even those necklaces over which Sarah got a lesson in negotiation Chennai style. When you enter the official temple grounds, you leave your shoes or sandals outside, so there are hundreds of pairs of all kinds of footwear scattered in waves around the entrance and you have to wonder how you will ever find your own . . . but that’s another story.
