Hot ticket: A scenic rail route across southern India

From the towering temples of Tamil Nadu to the shrine of Shiva on the River Kaveri, the rail journey from Kerala to the Bay of Bengal is the perfect Indian adventure for historian and broadcaster Michael Wood

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

In my mind's eye I imagine trundling along the shores of Orissa, where flamingos rise in clouds on the vast mirror of Chilika Lake; or purple dawns over the desert of Rajasthan. Not to mention the thrills of the night train from Kolkata up to Benares: tea from clay cups at first light at Moghul Serai, then rumbling across the Curzon Bridge as the splendid curve of the Ganges opens out before you. But in the end I always come back to the south, where from the train window you can see rice paddies gleaming after rain, and palm forests topped by temple towers – the sights, sounds and smells of India's tropics.

Born in the cold North of England, I confess I'm irresistibly hooked on India's South. To walk into Egmore train station in Madras (now Chennai), clutching my precious ticket, still quickens my heart with a barely suppressed exhilaration. The finest southern journey is a route that crosses the Indian peninsula, from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal. By the standards of long-distance rail trips in India, it is not too long – less than 500km as the crow flies – so it's easily done in a short holiday, and although its quicker by road, you can do it all by train, and for me that takes you at a perfect pace. You can journey either way, starting in Chennai or in Kerala but it's best, I think, to begin on the Kerala coast.

Hang out in old Cochin for a while and sample the delights of the backwaters, or the beaches of Kovalam and Varkala, then, when suitably relaxed (it doesn't take long) you can set off.

These days Kerala has many lovely places to stay: converted mansions, seaside cottages and Ayurvedic retreats, some of them very upmarket. When we were filming this year we stayed on Ashtamudi Lake in a big airy house on a promontory in a palm-fringed lagoon. The owner is a local sculptor and the lighthouse has been turned into a voluptuous river goddess, visible from afar across the water. The four bedrooms on the second floor look out over the lake, and during those early summer nights we slept without mosquito nets, windows open to the warm, scented, breeze.

From the hotel it is only a short way into Kollam (formerly Quilon), by road or on the water taxis that criss-cross the maze of backwaters. Kollam is a small place on the main coast road between Trivandrum and Cochin, (from both of which you can also begin this journey – and do it quicker – on the main line overnight trains to Madurai).

Known to the ancient Greeks as a spice port, over the centuries Kollam has drawn Arabs, Chinese and Portuguese to its shores. The town stands on a strip of land between freshwater lakes and the sea, and it still has a few old narrow backstreets, with Kerala coffee shops and Syrian Christian shrines. From the little quay on the south side of the lake you can take cruises through the islands in the backwaters, or short hops along green canals between thatched villages, where the white spires of Christian basilicas peep mysteriously through the palm fronds.

When it is time to move on, the Tinnevelly passenger train leaves Kollam station just after dawn (the best time to travel in South India, before the heat rises). Soon you are winding up into the wooded hills of the Western Ghats, through tangled forests, and tea plantations.

On its main lines Indian Railways now has "carriage cars" instead of the old compartment trains with open windows. Air conditioning and tinted windows may be be good for the locals, but for the leisure traveller they are to be avoided if possible. This means travelling second-class, at least by day. That way you can stare out as the world goes by, sit on the steps with the door open, or jump on and off at the little country halts where women sell baskets of guavas, bananas and vadai. It's a nice easy pace, and the heat of day will be up by the time you reach Tenkasi Junction in Tamil Nadu at 10am.

Then it's along the plain, the dramatic crags of the Ghats rising on your left, to Virudhunagar where, later in the day, you pick up the connection that, by early evening, will get you to your first great stop on the journey: Madurai.

The ancient capital of southern India, Madurai grew up in the late Iron Age; it's mentioned by the Greeks who came here, according to ancient Tamil poets, "across the splashing foam in their beautiful ships" seeking spices, pepper and ginger, some of them staying on as traders, mercenaries, and sculptors – they were first Westerners to be seduced by the climate and people of the south.

These days Madurai is still a great lure for travellers. The Hotel Supreme is where I regularly stay, the rooftop restaurant of which serves a delicious crispy dosa with chilled beer as night falls over the hum of the city.

At the centre of the old city is one of the most jaw-dropping buildings in India: the great temple of the goddess Minakshi. Every day 20,000 pilgrims pour in (the number rises to a million or two at festival time) to see loincloth-clad priests striped with ash perform ancient rituals, while squealing trumpets and thundering drums echo in its vast corridors.

It's actually a temple to the great god Shiva, but the real patron of the city is the goddess. In her innermost shrine amid the flickering lamps, devotees wait in a breathless hush until the music strikes up, the curtain is drawn and she appears framed by a circle of golden light. Non-Hindus can't go that far, but there is so much else to see here: the stepped water-tank, the thousand-pillared hall, the stalls selling every conceivable kind of pilgrim souvenir, and the temple elephant, his forehead resplendent with snaking patterns of sandal paste, who for a two-rupee coin will bless you on the head with a moist breathy touch of his trunk. Outside in a great 17th-century arcade are the tailors' shops, where you can't go a few yards without being asked for your inside leg measurement and promised a suit at your hotel by three that afternoon.

And after a dosa, when the heat of the day has faded, go back into the temple to walk the great corridors in darkness, the stone still warm under your bare feet, and watch the night rituals, when Shiva is serenaded to bed in his palanquin, with trumpet and drums, as the moon rises over the Lotus Tank.

Climbing back on the train in Madurai, the journey now heads northeast to Tanjore, about 200km away by rail. (It's quicker by bus, but let's stick to our brief – this is a train journey.) Tanjore was the old capital of the Chola empire between the 10th and the 13th centuries, one of the greatest periods in Indian culture. The big temple here was finished in 1010; its huge pyramidal tower was then the tallest building in India. It's set in a magnificent sun-baked courtyard beyond which coconut palms toss their heads beguilingly.

Walk through the hall, a perfect thousand-year-old building, and in the sanctum you will be able to witness the rituals at the great lingam of Shiva and hear the spine-tingling drone and chant as milk libations are poured over the massive, polished, black monolith.

In the old town there's a rambling palace where the Raja of Tanjore still lives. The huge durbar hall is a forest of painted wooden columns with a glittering throne canopy of mirrored glass. Next door is the royal library, which is older than the Bodleian in Oxford and houses a collection of ancient palm-leaf Tamil manuscripts whose texts go back, amazingly, to the third century BC.

In the museum a fascinating exhibition shows the royal collections of the late 18th and early 19th century, when kings such as Serfoji imported European learning, including physiology textbooks from Edinburgh, Dr Johnson's dictionary, and a complete skeleton for anatomy lessons (made of ivory, as a real one would have offended Hindu religious sensibilities).

Further into the palace grounds, past the elephant sheds, you enter a beautiful courtyard full of potted plants, which houses the art gallery and the greatest collection of bronzes in all India. Cast between the 9th and the 17th centuries the statues are all swaying lines and lovely curves; wasp-waisted goddesses and androgynous male divinities with a hint of puppy fat above their jewelled waistbands. They depict ancient Tamil themes: god as the dancer, the yogi or beggar; the goddess as virgin, benign wife, or dark mother, themes still endlessly reinvented today in Indian cinema and television.

My own favourite is a metre-high masterpiece cast in 1011 that shows Shiva as a sinuous cowherd with a turban of snakes, his legs crossed, left arm provocatively hanging by his hip, naked but for the skimpiest wrap around his thighs, which serves only to draw attention to his heavenly attributes – Tamil art is nothing if not sensuous. There had been nothing like it since the ancient Greeks, and (saving Donatello perhaps) there has been nothing like it since.

After a feast for all the senses, you can take the train on from Tanjore Junction. The next leg is very short, just 70km long (a bit like going from Manchester to Sheffield on the trans-Pennine line). Southern Railways are in the throes of modernisation, and the delightful slow train down the River Kaveri isn't running at the moment. It used to stop at 15 stations between Tanjore and Mayavaram, with lovely names that trip off the tongue in Tamil: Sunderaperumalkoil, Tiruvidaimarudur, Anandatandavapuram. At nearly every halt, temple towers rear above the palm forest like exotic, petrified vegetation. This stretch is a great place to stop in the morning, get off who knows where and just wander, hire a bike perhaps, and get back on in the evening.

Just 40km from Tanjore is Kumbakonum, a bustling commercial city and an ancient cultural capital on the Kaveri. The best place to stay here (and it's one of the nicest in the South) is a few kilometres out of town at Swamimalai. Here a little settlement of old Brahmin houses with wooden-pillared verandas and tiled roofs has been converted into a charming hotel: The Sterling Resort. There are terracotta statues of village deities in the leafy garden and a small pool. Deer wander around nonchalantly. In the dining hall, you eat dosas with sambhar by lamplight behind mosquito screens as night comes on.

All around here in the forest are fabulously evocative medieval shrines, some now run down and half forgotten. In Swamimalai itself you can visit Murugan, one of the favourite deities of the Tamils: the auspicious, Apollonian male god who here stands hauntingly in his sanctum as the renouncer, covered with grey ash. And outside there's great food for a few rupees in the pilgrim lodges behind the temple.

Being a vegetarian culture, the Tamils have one of the best forms of fast food in the world: steaming plates of fluffy idli (rice cakes) in the morning, special dosas at midday, and in the evening thalis eaten from a ribbed banana leaf.

Swamimalai is also the town of bronze casting, an ancient craft that runs in families, some of whom can trace their ancestry back a thousand years. Today, these families still make bronze figures of the gods for temples using the ancient "lost wax" process, but they also make them for sale.

You can buy them at the craft shops in Tanjore and Chennai and also from the makers here. One of the oldest families, S Devasenapathy and Sons, has its own workshop near the Murugan temple behind an unprepossessing modern shop front. Three brothers now run the business, and these days they make images for temples in the US and the UK, as well as all over South Asia.

Clutching your new bronze under your arm you pick up the train again at Kumbakonum and make your way down the River Kaveri to one of most celebrated places in the South: the shrine of Shiva as the cosmic dancer at Chidambaram. A typical dusty Tamil country town, Chidambaram is modernising fast these days; its old pillared houses are being torn down and being replaced by electronics shops and swish new concrete retirement homes. But it's still a great place if you like small-town India, off the tourist track. The temple has a beautiful spacious sacred tank and a spectacular array of 12th-century monuments, including a thousand-pillared hall. The priests here are an endogamous clan who have resisted all attempts since 1947 to "nationalise" them. They still administer the shrine with the same punctilious care they have shown since the fifth century when, the temple legend insists, they migrated from the north. It's especially fun to be here at festival time – the winter version starting 25 December this year, or in May-June, in what the Tamils call "the ripe heat".

Chidambaram is only a few miles from the Bay of Bengal: but for the last leg I suggest you take the train on as far as Cuddalore and then take a taxi to Pondicherry. A former French colony, "Pondi" has a different feel to the rest of the South. It changed its name last year to the old Tamil Puduchery, but you'll still find Rue Dumas and Rue Roman Rolland; there are games of boules in the park; and the policemen still wear the kepi hat. In the leafy streets of the old town are elegant colonial houses and hotels with names like Dupleix and the gorgeous L'Orient. So after your days of rice and sambhar, dosas and idli, why not treat yourself to croissants and coffee for breakfast at La Terrasse?

Take a wander in Pondi's delightful backstreets and bookshops after you have slept off your siesta, and before dinner at Satsanga. Join the locals on their sunset promenade along Goubert Salai, the sea breeze playing with the hems of the ladies' saris as they juggle their bags of designer shopping and their mobile phones.

So that's my journey across South India from sea to sea. The first time I travelled in Tamil Nadu I thought it a magic land, and so it still seems to me, even though India is modernising fast, the population boom is unabated, environmental problems are growing, and rural poverty is still a fact of life. To me South India is one of the most exciting places in the world: a busy, modern, vibrant place but still a living ancient civilisation. Recently a friend of mine who had never been there came back from the South: "I didn't think that such things still existed on the planet," he said.

Ah, but they do.

Michael Wood's 'The Story of India' is published by BBC Books (£20); the DVD of the TV series is out now (£16.99). 'A South Indian Journey' is published by Penguin (£8.99)

Traveller's guide

GETTING THERE

The gateways to southern India are Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai. Chennai and Bangalore are served by British Airways (0870 850 9850; www.ba.com ) from Heathrow; Bangalore is also served by Air India (020-8560 9996; www.airindia.com ) from Heathrow. Mumbai is served by BA, Air India, Virgin Atlantic (08705 747747; www.virgin-atlantic.com ) and Jet Airways (0870 910 1000; www.jetairways.com ), all from Heathrow.

Charter flights to Goa are also available with Thomsonfly (0870 190 0737; www.thomsonfly.com ) from Gatwick, Birmingham and Manchester.com) from Gatwick. Emirates (0870 243 2222; www.emirates.com ) flies to Trivandrum in Kerala from a range of UK airports via Dubai.

GETTING AROUND

Tour operators offering journeys in southern India include Explore (0844 499 0901; www.explore.co.uk ); its 23-day "From Bengal to the Malabar Coast" trip costs from £1,689. All transfers and travel (including rail journeys) B &B accommodation and sightseeing are included in the price, but international flights are not. Exodus (0845 863 9600; www.exodus.co.uk ) offers a 16-day "South India Explored" trip from £1,769, including flights from London to Cochin, all transport and transfers and B&B accommodation .

For advice on independent rail travel, visit www.seat61.com .

STAYING THERE

Valiya Vila Estate, Kollam, Kerala (00 91 474 270 1546; www.kollamlakeviewresort.com ). Hotel Supreme, Madurai, Tamil Nadu (00 91 452 234 3151; www.supremehotels.com ). The Sterling Resort, Swamimalai, Tamil Nadu (00 91 44 2498 4114; www.sterlingswamimalai.net ). Hotel Le Dupleix, Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu (00 91 413 222 6999; www.ledupleix.com ). Hotel de L'Orient, Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu (00 91 413 234 3067; www.neemranahotels.com ).

MORE INFORMATION

British passport holders require a visa, available from the High Commission of India in London (020-7836 8484; www.hcilondon.net ); or the Consulate-General of India in Birmingham (0121 212 2782) or Edinburgh (0131 229 2144). Significant delays are being experienced. Indian Tourism: 020-7437 3677; www.incredibleindia.org