Lingaraj Temple: A Shravan Monday in Bhubaneswar
The rickshaw drops me at the edge of the old city while it is still dark, and I walk the last stretch to the temple on foot because everyone else is walking too. It is a Monday in Shravan, the month the whole country gives to Shiva, and in Bhubaneswar that means one destination. The lanes narrow as they near the temple, lined already with the flower-sellers setting out their baskets — marigold in loose heaps, and beside them the thing you actually came to buy, the trifoliate bel leaf, the bilva, sold in little bundles tied with thread. A boy presses one into my hand before I have decided to buy it. This early, the air is cool in a way Bhubaneswar rarely is by August, and the crowd moves quietly, the way people do before the sun is properly up.
This is Ekamra Kshetra, the old name of this city — the place of a single mango tree. Long before the modern capital of Odisha grew up around it, this was a dense forest of shrines, and at the centre of it stands the Lingaraj, the temple that gives Bhubaneswar its very name. Tribhuvaneswara, Lord of the Three Worlds; Bhubaneswar, the lord's town. You arrive at the god before you can even say where you are.
The tank comes first
You do not go straight to the temple. First you go to the water.
North of the temple lies the Bindu Sagar, a great rectangular tank that the pilgrims will tell you holds a drop of every sacred river in India — that is what the name means, the ocean of drops. Whether or not you believe the geography of it, the ritual is old and unbroken: you bathe here, or at least touch the water to your head, before you present yourself at the shrine. In the grey light the steps down to the tank are already crowded, men in wet dhotis, women with the ends of their saris pulled over their hair, everyone doing the same small thing — a dip, a cupped handful lifted and poured back, a moment with eyes shut. The water is cold enough to wake you fully. Then you climb the steps back up, dripping, and turn toward the tower you have been aware of the whole time without quite looking at it.
Because the tower is the thing. The deul, the great curving spire over the sanctum, rises something like fifty-five metres — close to a hundred and eighty feet — of carved sandstone, and at this hour it stands almost black against a sky just beginning to go pale behind it. It is one of the finest things the Kalinga builders ever raised. The main structure is eleventh-century work, from the time of the Somavamshi kings, though there was worship on this spot for centuries before the stone went up. You feel that age. The carving climbs the whole height of the tower in bands — figures, animals, dancers, the patient stonework of people who did not expect to see it finished in their own lifetimes.
The queue, and what it is carrying
By the time I join the line it has already formed into that particular temple-morning shape: slow, patient, good-humoured, everyone holding roughly the same things. A brass or steel pot of water. The bundle of bel leaves. Some carry milk; a few carry small pots of water they have walked a long way with, the way the kanwariyas do in the north. In Shravan the offering to Shiva is simple and it is always the same — water and bilva poured over the linga, again and again, an abhisheka repeated by thousands of hands across a single morning.
The line moves through the outer complex, and even waiting you are surrounded by the temple. The courtyard inside the great boundary wall holds scores of smaller shrines — well over a hundred of them, they say — so that the Lingaraj is less a single building than a walled town of the gods, with the one enormous tower at its heart. There is an order to the great temple itself: the sanctum under the tower, then the assembly hall, the dancing hall, and the hall of offerings, each added in its time, each with its own roof-line, stepping down from the spire like a range of hills.
If you are not a Hindu you will not be allowed through the inner gate — that is the rule here, plainly stated and firmly kept — but there is a raised platform outside the northern wall from which you can see the whole complex, and no one minds you standing there a long while. I have taken more than one visiting friend to that platform at exactly this hour, and watched the tower do to them what it does.
Hara and Hari, in one stone
Here is the thing about the Lingaraj that I did not understand until someone inside the family explained it to me, and it is the detail I now tell everyone. The linga in the sanctum is not shaped and carved the way most are. It is a rough, self-formed stone — swayambhu, they call it, self-manifested — a broad uneven granite that rises out of the floor. And it is worshipped as two gods at once. This is Harihara: Shiva and Vishnu in a single form, Hara and Hari together. So the god here takes both offerings. The bel leaf, which is Shiva's. And the tulsi, the holy basil, which is Vishnu's. On the same stone, on the same morning, from the same hands.
There is something in that which stays with me longer than the architecture. In a country where people can be so fierce about whether they are Shaiva or Vaishnava, whose god is the higher one, here is an ancient shrine that simply refuses the question. You bring your bel and your tulsi both, and the stone accepts both, and no one on the steps is arguing about it. The abiding smell of the place holds the same doubleness — wet stone and crushed bilva, marigold going soft in the heat, and under all of it the sandalwood-and-camphor haze that soaks into an old temple until you cannot tell the building from the offering. Days later a stick of good temple incense can put me straight back on those steps.
After
The darshan itself, when it comes, is brief the way these things always are — a press forward, the dark cool of the inner hall, the priest's quick hands, the water going over the stone, and then you are moving out again before you have finished arriving. Nobody lingers long inside; the line behind you is the whole city.
But you are not done when you step out. On a Shravan Monday you sit a while on the outer steps, in the sun that has finally come up over the tower, and you watch the next thousand people do exactly what you just did — the tank, the leaves, the water, the stone that is two gods. Mahashivratri is the temple's great night, when a single huge lamp is carried up and lit at the very top of the spire and the whole city looks up at it. But an ordinary Shravan Monday, I think, shows you more of what the Lingaraj actually is: not a spectacle, just a very old rhythm that the town has kept, unbroken, for a thousand years — one bel leaf, one handful of water, one morning at a time.
