Kapileswar

, originally uploaded by SkEye Travel.

The Lord God Made Them All

Visit a busy Hindu temple and you’ll probably find some bizarre manifestations of simple human (or animal) instincts and behaviour on display. The last mainstream Hindu temple I visited was Kalighat in Calcutta in 2003. She was a wild melee of physical sensations, intimacies, huckstering, chaos, completely obliterating intellectual, mental or cognitive behaviour. And entirely satisfying for it. For the non-Hindu or the non-practising Hindu, temples are definitely an acquired taste. Tourism however is an entirely different thing. When you’re a ‘tourist’ you’ll endure all sorts of uncomfortable, physically taxing, overpriced, disgusting, enervating situations merely because someone has placed a sign saying Scenic Overlook over a scenic overlook (for example; or, Historically Significant Bunch of Rocks over a bunch of rocks). Temples attract the misfortunate and the misbegotten, the unloved and the uncared-for – and there are so many in India; they will congregate at a temple possibly hoping to receive some drops of the skimmed milk of human kindness. Temples can be sobering, but I suppose that’s what the point of ‘religion’ in general is anyway. The other thing is that I am never really sure what I am supposed to do in a temple, being that I rarely visit and dont really pray or worship there, and they can all be so different across this country. So I'm not always sure of the order in which things are to be done; fellow temple-goers and the odd priest could hector you loudly if you did something that was not kosher. A general rule of thumb therefore is to follow the herd. If I could I would like to go sit in the corner of a temple and do nothing else but to watch an entire cross section of society drift by. It is also perhaps the voyeur in me that is curious about how people look when they do the most private things (in public). Prayer, the body languages of reverence, ritual and solitude, the fleeting innocence, are shockingly private and to watch someone else do it is a little like watching them take their clothes off. In that moment of standing before your God you are completely alone and cocooned in your fears, hopes, aspirations or grief even as you are in a crowd. I have found that you can cry in a temple and no one will look askance, no one will stare. This is possibly a good thing about temples. Oh yes and there is that other thing about the collective energy of ritual. And as you bow silently giving your God your wish-list, everyone else doing the same thing. There is something to be said for that.

So it was with a little trepidation and a little tourist that I found myself in Madras’ Kapileshwar ( at 7:30 on a Wednesday morning. I have passed this temple often and thought that it would make for some interesting photographs. Kapileshwar is old, peaceful and beautiful, particularly distinctive is it’s gopuram made up of brightly painted carvings of kings, warriors, worshippers, sages, nymphs, gods and demons. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to take inside as an offering so I asked the flower seller/keeper-of-shoes-lady. “You take a basket of nagalinga flowers for Shiva, some lamps, and the basket of jasmine for Karpagammal.” It all came to Rs. 130. Outraged at the price I said that I only wanted the nagalinga flowers and some lamps. The flower seller turned psycho on me. “What! You don’t want to go see Shiva’s mother! How can you come here and not see Shiva’s Amma! Who goes to a temple and doesn’t get blessings from Shiva’s mother?! Don’t you want blessings from Karpagammal?” (See what I mean about not knowing what to do) And I thought Shiva didn’t have a mother actually, considering that he is both the Masterful Progenitor and Destroyer of the Universe. To prevent her from heaping further abuse on me I hurriedly said yes to the jasmine as well.

But the reason I'm writing about my visit to Kapileshwar this morning is because of something fascinatingI witnessed at the temple tank. I fear I may have nightmares about it. It could possibly be made into a B grade horror flick called The Night of the Frenzied Catfish Who Will Surely Eat You. As big as a football pitch the rectangular tank with a little temple in the middle was very peaceful this morning. There were just a few people and priests sitting on the steps leading down to it. And then it started. Small groups of young men, and families with small kids came down to the tank with loaves of bread, puffed rice balls, raw rice, hard baked buns to hurl into the water. The instant something landed in the water there was a loud mass slapping flapping thwacking as what looked like a thousand sleek fat grey-black things frenziedly pounced on it. They looked like catfish with menacing-looking spikes guarding the sides of their gumless raw red open mouths. There was something sad and sinister in how they all threw themselves (seemingly) blindly at the source of the sound of the splash, eventually ending up as one heaving flapping dark mass.

I think this is classic Pavlovian conditioning since the fish were pouncing on anything thrown in the water, responding to the sound and impact, a conditioned response sans strategy or intelligence. There is no need for the latter anyway since there really is nothing to hunt or seek. And this is how the humans come into this bizarre little eco-system. They were equally fascinating to watch. It was some sort of sport or entertainment for the humans to watch these beasts converge and fight. I was watching the little kids, and as terrified as they were, I think they felt a sense of mastery, of power, a sense of making impact, of being able to control something. The same reason why children are cruel and how some perfectly nice kids can torture younger smaller siblings and pets etc. When a packet of rice balls or a loaf of bread had been fed to the fish they would whine and nag at their parents to get some more. What really upset me (apart from the red hungry spiky mouths that will no doubt haunt me for a while) was the wanton wastage of food. The louts disposing entire loaves of bread to create and watch this spectacle would (perhaps) deny the poor pockmarked leper outside the temple a little bit of breakfast. That’s how things are I suppose.
Go to a temple, you’ll definitely see something interesting.