Yesterday we rode with Krishna.
Today our driver was Vishnu.
As divine guides and protectors, you couldn’t ask for a better calibre.
Sadly Vishnu was more accustomed to keeping Creation on the rails than maintaining his battered Tata’s position on the road. We weaved drunkenly from Udaipur to the hill fortress at Kumbulgarh and then onto the 16th century Jain temple at Ranakpur before the 150km drive home.
Poor Vishnu struggled to keep us on the tarmac despite fierce concentration and a vice like grip on the controls. It was preferable to think that he was merely an erratic driver rather than the unpalatable alternative; that the steering column had been entirely disconnected from the wheels at the last service.
Brian and Denise from Waterford made up a car full and we raced across increasingly mountainous terrain. Vishnu was born and bred in Udaipur but sadly his job often entailed time away from his family which may have accounted for the speed with which he wanted to get to each destination.
Kumbulgarh reveals itself from behind sheer rock faces that open onto an expanse of walls on a scale of Chittor that we saw a few days before. The retreat of last resort, its size and remoteness was matched only by the sparseness of its decoration. No self-respecting Mewar prince would plan to spend more time here than was absolutely necessary. Despite this there was the usual sprinkling of temples and palaces within the walls. Any besieging force would first have to overcome the psychological barrier presented by the elevation before even contemplating the fortress itself.
On a whistle-stop tour we saw little in the interior but marvelled at the exterior that juts like a giant cairn from the natural contours of the land. Huge gates are reinforced by projecting buttresses in the walls that create splendid opportunities to pour deadly cross-fire on the hapless attacker.
Ranakpur, by contrast is a sublime place of worship for the Jain religion. Now limited to 2 million adherents in India, the high water mark of the faith was in the 16th century when the temple – the largest of its type - was constructed. Erected entirely in white marble, it boasts twenty-nine superb and ornately carved domes supported by an indeterminate number of uniquely carved pillars. The consensus is 1,444 but the faith prohibits the counting of them for to do so is regarded as an attempt to define the divine and so an affront to the deities that they worship. As if to reinforce the flawed nature of man’s relationship with the divine, a single pillar has been erected at an angle marginally off centre, obvious to those who know but otherwise imperceptible amongst the forest of others.
Strangely, the temple has a later adjunct built along the same lines but whose walls are festooned with nudity and congress that seem at odds with the piety of the larger structure.
But even here the faith has been corrupted by the hard sell mentality that pervaded much of our Indian back catalogue. Young devotees – if in fact they were - and one even claiming seventeen unbroken generations of priestly devotion, made a desultory effort at giving some background to the temple. It sounded more like a script and his heart clearly wasn’t in it. And when a contribution to temple maintenance was suggested, we were actively steered away from the collection boxes, suggesting his robes had deeper pockets than his aesthete appearance might have suggested.
Even then, extracting some change from the large denomination donation was a battle that we lost, more because he scarpered, than as a result of any desire to earn favour with the Jain deities. Seconds later, another henna toting priestlet appeared from behind a pillar and following a polite attempt to explain our currently unresolved contribution situation, got quite shirty.
Shrugging him off, we wandered the cool marbled cloisters as the afternoon light was easing the temperature. The never ending Nagga – a cobra deity similar to the incarnation that shaded Buddha at his moment of enlightenment - winds eternally around its own marble coils. A six hundred year old Mimosa tree grows under the central dome, said to be the inspiration for the choice of the temple’s location. In its folds the face of the Hindu elephant God, Ganesh, sits serenely. In periodic alcoves, Buddha-like statues sit wreathed in incense. The Jain religion is separate from India’s other main faiths but the similarities are everywhere to be seen.
Outside the temple, macaques roamed, occasionally making a half-hearted foray at an attendant or tourist but departing in haste at the wave of a stick or a raised voice.
Sadly, on our return journey a dog darted out in front of Vishnu's Tata and went under the wheels, to a heart-rending sound, part aggression, part pain. We craned our necks to see him rise from the dust behind us and make for the roadside vegetation, most probably to die slowly and painfully.
Vishnu powered on but for the rest of the journey we all sat in a sombre silence.
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