Chennai: Warp And Weft

Dusty and littered, muggy in the high heat, congested with traffic that chugs fitfully past fading colonial monuments, it’s a far cry from your idyllic tourist retreat. Yet I’d always wanted to go to Madras, the historic capital region of India’s southeastern coast, and it turned out to be a worthwhile trip. While we tend to link the city with its namesake preppy plaid, there’s a new post-colonial moniker — Chennai — and it’s one of the world’s fastest-growing cities. Fabric is still an important local industry, but today’s Chennai is a flourishing business center for software, financial services and hardware manufacturing. It’s the setting for “Kollywood,” a major segment of the Indian film industry; and as home to a third of the country’s automotive and automotive parts business, the city is also dubbed “India’s Detroit.”

Chennai offers sightseers the vestiges of two different heritages: Indian and colonial. There are remarkable stone shrines and temples of the Indian clans which originated in the area, notably the Pallava Dynasty, which dominated from the third to ninth centuries. European elements were introduced with the 1523 arrival of the Portuguese, followed in the next century by the Dutch. But it was the British East India Company that bought a strip of land and built Fort St. George, still the heart of the central city.

The easiest way to get around is by tuk tuk, the three-wheeled motorized vehicles that skim around town charging a mere few dollars per destination. Following Britain’s lead, I started out at Fort St. George. Many of its historic structures have been converted to government offices, but visitors can gape at military memorabilia in a dusty museum set up in the Old Exchange Building. From there it’s a few blocks over to St. Mary’s, the oldest surviving British church. It was the setting for the marriage of 17th-century governor Elihu Yale, who later founded the university in New Haven. Yale’s toddler son is buried here, and the walls are lined with heart-rending memorial plaques commemorating wives, soldiers and comrades, many felled in their 20s and 30s combating enemies or succumbing to the harsh climate.

In total contrast, not far away is the colorful seventh-century Dravidian Kapaleeshwarar Temple. Dedicated to Shiva’s wife Parvati, every inch of its surface is cluttered with painted pottery statues of goddesses, creatures and mortals. Nearby, an important church of a different faith, San Thome Basilica, is dedicated to Jesus’ disciple who was dispatched here to convert the pagans of India. After an enemy speared him in the back, followers entombed his martyred remains in the pristine, white plaster, multi-spired cathedral, its walls lined with poster biographies recounting the fates of the twelve apostles.

I drove by the red brick High Court near the center of town. Said to be the second-largest judicial building in the world, it is a classic example of Indo-Saracenic architecture, a wondrous 19th-century British Victorian hodgepodge of Indo-Islamic and Indian architecture woven together with Gothic revival and Neo-classical elements. The similarly fanciful 16-acre Pantheon complex (Romanesque meets Taj Mahal) houses almost 50 art and natural history galleries within its six museum structures.

But the city’s most touted sight is Marina Beach, stretching almost eight miles along the east edge of the city. Chennaites boast that it is one of the longest beaches in the world. The Bay of Bengal waves crashing on its block-wide expanse of sand are too rough and unsafe for swimming; nonetheless, crowds gather to play volleyball, speechify at political demonstrations, snack at makeshift peddlers’ booths and entertain the kids with mini Ferris wheels and romper cars all propelled by proprietors cranking away by hand.

Though tempted by the street food, I diverted to outstanding local restaurants for great meals and snacks. At Annalakshmi, a popular vegetarian eatery, the friendly proprietor served up platters of delicious potatoes and spinach, carrot salad and something unfamiliar called “bitter gourd” which looked like caterpillars but tasted crunchy and delicious. Authentic foods from neighboring Kerala — whole fish, beef and lamb curries — are served in the coolly elegant rooms of family-operated Kudumbam. Vasco’s at the Chennai Hilton serves an all-day buffet with four open kitchens concocting omelets, sliced fruits and curries prepared to order. I walked through the gardens of the Amethyst Café, stopped there for tea and shopped at its spacious upstairs boutique where embroidered brocade thong-sandal “boots” were hard to resist.

I didn’t want to miss the historic temples 30 miles away at Mamallapuram. Driving south, I passed giant posters of film star politicians looming over untethered cows foraging streetside and “nanny” road signs warning, “Speed Kills But Thrills.” Reaching the Pallava Dynasty’s key seaport, I walked up to the Shore Temple, which is protected by a dike from the sea. Though weathered, it retains exquisite carvings of the river god Ganga’s descent to Earth. A short walk away, the Five Rathas is a cluster of stone temples, each created in a different architectural style.

For lunch I stopped at the unusual INDeco Mahabalipuram boutique hotel on six beachside acres a few steps from the Shore Temple. Its open-air lobby “museum” displays a collection of kerosene-operated fans, tin table lamps, military camp cots, cane and wicker chairs, and other colonial artifacts assembled by hospitality entrepreneur Steve Borgia. Specially designed white domes are the guest suites in this unusual establishment, the only Indian winner of the Global Ecotourism Award.

Heading back into town, I drove by women with twig brooms patiently sweeping sand off the toll road and stopped at Dakshina-Chitra, a folklore village compiled from historic houses brought in from around the region. As I wandered through the Tamil basket weavers’ mud houses and the cluster of weavers’ stone houses from Karnataka, craftspeople demonstrated sari weaving and metal forging and invited me to try my hand at grinding rice flour and spinning a ceramic pot.

Back in town, I wandered through neighborhoods where women in saris wove garlands of bright orange and white blossoms for the temples, and storefront launderers wearing impeccable white tunics pressed clothes with irons heated by charcoal. In every patch of empty ground, children were playing at makeshift cricket. When I stopped in a shop to buy a local costume, there was a teenager on hand to stitch on the optional sleeves at his sewing machine — the whole process accomplished in less than 15 minutes.

After the pandemonium of the streets and the hot and humid weather, it was a relief to retreat to the comfortable surroundings of the new Chennai Hilton. Up on the roof, I slipped into the infinity lap pool, swimming back and forth as I looked out over the complex, cacophonous, truly fascinating city.