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An Ode to History...

This blog is exactly what the title says it is - its an ode to history. It contains, within its hallowed premises, all the travelogues to historical places I've been to - along with plenty of snippets on history. Enter, ye all, and be right welcome!

Thursday, February 19, 2004

Friday, February 7, 2003

Udaiyaarkudi

Our next stop was Udaiyaarkudi - another temple with a good deal of historical interest.

Udaiyaarkudi

We arrived there about 11.30 AM, after retracing our steps from Kadambur- and we were so famished that we decided on a food-break. Brunch (a combo of lunch and breakfast, which we missed) was at Hotel Selva's. By 12.15, we were finished. With the sun on our heads, we walked around the temple, which were undergoing repairs (most temples seemed to). It was quite deserted, and we spent a pleasant few minutes walking around the place, admiring the sculptures.


I guess, in comparison with the Periya Koil and other renowned spots, these smaller temples looked rather faded. Worse, they had been painted over so completely and thoroughly( 'Asian' paintings, as Mr. Vijayakumar remarked:-) that one couldn't make out the original features at all. For all that, we managed to see plenty.

Udaiyaarkudi, for instance, is the site of the most startling inscription-one that condemns Ravidasan, his brother Parameswaran, and other conspirators, their families, those who married into them, the whole set-up, in fact, to an exile outside Chozha Nadu. The inscription says 'Throgigalaanaa...Ravidasan...' and that sparked off a whole new thread. Throgigal. If RD and the rest of the caboodle had been Pandiya naattu aabathuthavigal, wouldn't they have been named as such? Why call them betrayers at all? Could there possibly be something behind that? One particular theory is that Ravidasan and Co., weren't Pandiyan citizens at all, but were part of the Chozha regime itself. Apparently, they had been assigned by 'someone inside' to put away the crown prince...it appears, however, that Raja raja Chozhan couldn't find enough evidence to support it.

Unfortunately, the 'kalvettu' that bears this inscription is so chock-full of paint that we almost raved in desperation:-) What wouldn't we have done to read a bit, just a tiny bit of those revolutionary words? No amount of scraping over the stone, or feeling our fingers along it could define them. It seems the writer Balakumaran went through the same fit of desperation. One part of the inscription was clearer than the rest- the paint had been rubbed off. The archagar remarked that the writer had painstakingly scraped off the paint over the inscription himself. In the end, we had to content ourselves with photographing it.

The 'Ravidasan' inscriptions


We got an unexpected bonus here- the archagar provided us with excellent, enchanting music. We were standing in the garba griham, waiting for the deepaaraathanai, when a voice rose suddenly, singing His praises. In the dark, confined room, it sounded pure and unearthly. There was complete silence for a while after he finished. It was only after he appeared with the vibuthi did we shake ourselves out of the trance.

posted by Pavithra Srinivasan  # 11:22 PM

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